As a cook and baker, I am woefully dependent upon using other peoples’ recipes rather than creating my own. Over the past few weeks of reading blogs and seeing how creative and innovative all of you are, I’ve been inspired to branch out and try to break my dependency on recipes and see what I can create based on what I either know or think will taste good. This is especially challenging to me when it comes to baking, because I have never before had to figure out on my own how much flour/”butter”/baking soda/baking powder/”milk”/sugar/etc., etc. is needed to yield my desired result. Since I’ve been baking a lot of scones lately, I felt most confident in trying those for my foray into recipe-free baking!

I adore scones and their versatility and recently had the idea of “stuffing” a scone. Before getting started last night, I thought all day yesterday about how I would prepare the unbaked scone dough so that it could be stuffed. After preparing my dough and filling and actually trying a few ways of getting the filling inside the dough, I decided I would roll out each individual scone dough ball, put a dollop of the “stuffing” inside and then fold the dough over and pinch the seams together. What I actually made was not so much a scone, but an empanada. These will heretofore be known as sconepanadas!!!!

This is what they looked like:

Sconepanadas

DOUGH
1 1/2 cups whole wheat pastry flour
1 1/2 cups graham flour
2 t baking powder
1 t baking soda
1/4 t cinnamon
1/4 t salt
1/3 cup Earth Balance
1/3 cup applesauce
2 T sugar
1/4 cup almond milk w/1 t apple cider vinegar mixed in
1 t vanilla

FILLING
1/4 cup dried bananas – reconstituted
1/4 cup dried dates – reconstituted
1/4 cup prune puree (I used this to get a slight chocolatey taste without using chocolate)
1/4 cup peanut butter
1 T agave nectar

PREPARATION
Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Sift all of the dry ingredients (flour through salt) in a bowl. Add the Earth Balance and applesauce to the dry ingredients and use your hands to incorporate them into the dough. In a separate bowl, mix together the sugar, almond milk, and vanilla then add it to the existing dough mixture. Use your hands to mix the dough together until all ingredients are incorporated.

Put the dried bananas and dried dates in a small pot of boiling water and simmer them for about five minutes until reconstituted. Drain them and place them on a cutting board and give them a rough chop. Transfer the chopped bananas/dates to a bowl and mix in the prune puree, peanut butter, and agave nectar.

Place a piece of parchment paper or silpat on a baking sheet. Scoop out 1/2 cup-sized balls of dough and place them on the baking sheet an inch or so apart from each other. Using either your hands or a small rolling pin (like one you would use for rolling fondant), flatten each dough ball to form an oval about 4 inches wide and six inches long. Scoop a tablespoon or so of the filling into the middle of each now-flattened dough ball. Pick up one end of the dough and fold it over the filling so that it meets the other end of the dough. Press the dough together to form a seam. Use the tines of a fork to make pretty lines over the seam.

Bake for 12 minutes. Makes ~8 sconepanadas.

These actually turned out pretty well for being the “guinea pig” batch for my first-ever total recipe creation. Strangely, they tasted better this morning than they did when they were fresh out the oven last night. I probably won’t make this exact recipe again, but I’d like to try some similar things and find a way to actually stuff a scone.

Please leave a comment and tell everyone about the first recipe you ever created! :-)