This month the Daring Bakers kept our creativity rolling with cinnamon bun inspired treats. Shelley from C Mom Cook dared us to create our own dough and fill it with any filling we wanted to craft tasty rolled treats, cinnamon not required!
Tell me, where has this month gone? How did it get to be the end of June all of a sudden? I swear, the last time I checked, it was the beginning of May, I was starting a new job (yay!), and this had just happened:
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I have a new favorite ingredient: dates.
I discovered them first in this totally amazing raw brownie recipe (seriously, they are awesome brownies, raw or otherwise) and I was basically flabbergasted that you could make something that tastes this good out of nothing but pulverized nuts, dates, and cocoa powder.
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Nate’s mum got me a subscription to bon appétit magazine for Christmas, and the March issue arrived last week. I went through and marked all the recipes I wanted to try, and on my second pass, I noticed a recipe that I had overlooked the first time: Bacon and Date Scones. Apparently the recipe comes from a restaurant in Venice, California, called Gjelina. I am a big fan of scones, salty-sweet combinations, and anything with bacon in it, so I knew I had to try these.
I took some inspiration from Heidi at 101 Cookbooks and modified the recipe a bit to use whole wheat pastry flour and raw cane sugar. The scones turned out well, but are very crumbly, I think because the whole wheat pastry flour has lower gluten than all purpose flour, so I’ve made a change to the recipe below to use half whole wheat pastry and half all purpose flour.
I wasn’t expecting these to be as sweet as they are, so I served them with soup. It worked alright, but they are better on their own, smeared with butter. The dates are sweet and almost caramelized, the bacon is salty and chewy, and the scones themselves are flaky. These are definitely a must-try!
