Clotted cream for Scones and Ginger & Orange Biscuit Pudding

I received a gratifying email today, thank you Stephanie, who wrote from Germany to say she had tried the scone recipe here on the blog. And they had come out very well! Please see the picture below. Beautifully upright as well. Mine often lean over in the oven trying to make friends.

Stephanie said that all that was missing was the clotted cream.  Whilst it is delicious it is not paramount to enjoying scones and certainly should not stop us making them.

Really clotted cream has only become universally available around Great Britain in the past 20 years or so. This is probably the result of a far stronger transport infrastructure and also modern technology with high speed freezing techniques. Suddenly it is possible to have English clotted cream on an aeroplane, find it in the Brooke Bond tea rooms in Tokyo and in every 5 star hotel around the country.

But it is what I would call a very local product. I remember being driven along high sides single track roads in Devon and Cornwall whilst on holiday as a child. The big thing was to look for a sign outside a farm that said ‘cream teas’. We would all troop in for fresh baked scones and that extra, extra special and elusive treat, clotted cream. It was a once a holiday (and therefore once a year) treat.

Clotted cream is a speciality of the West Country or south west England. I am presuming this is because there is rich pasture and lots of dairy herds producing rich creamy milk. Each dairy farm would produce their own clotted cream and serve it to holiday makers in the summer as an additional small income stream. Until the recent high speed freezing methods it was not possible to keep the cream for more than a few days and this is why it was regarded as such a luxury.

If you were to eat scones in Scotland, it is unlikely you would have them served with cream, it would be with butter, so please don’t be deterred from making scones just because you do not have any clotted cream. They are so delicious hot from the oven with a knob of butter or even just some jam. And of course you could have some whipped cream.

However I have been experimenting making some clotted cream – with difficulty! There seem to be a number of different recipes. Last night I cooked double cream on a very low heat for 8 hours so when I woke this morning the dish had that lovely buttery thick crust on top. I let it cool in the dish and then refrigerated. Sadly the thick crust was fine but the cream had not thickened enough below. I think the quality of the cream or milk makes a big difference. The milk and cream in London is not straight from the cow of course having been pasteurised. But tomorrow I see if I can find some non-homogenised full cream gold top milk.

How odd to describe it as such considering we buy all our milk in cartons today! But I remember milk being left at the back door as a child – there was gold top and silver top. Gold top would have a creamy layer that was visible at the top of the bottle. If the weather was very cold, this creamy part would freeze and expand upwards, pushing the lid off as a little hat. The birds would also come and peck at this delicacy.

And that reminds me of one of my mother’s lunch-party puddings – such a 70’s pudding. Everything was about short cuts and using all the wonderful manufactured foods – who else remembers ‘For Mash, get Smash’ our space –age mashed potato that was advertised by space aliens.

Ginger and Orange pudding:

Ingredients:

1 large packet of ginger nuts

Orange juice

Good quality Lemon Curd

A small bowl of whipped cream (somewhere between a 150ml and280ml carton of cream)

1. Soak the gingernuts in the orange juice for a couple of minutes so they become softer – perhaps do a few at a time. You don’t want them to completely disintegrate

2. Spread each one with lemon curd

3. Sandwich them together in a long line (rather like putting them back in a packet) or perhaps two lines next to each other

4. Or build a pyramid, laying the soaked biscuits on a plate, spread the lemon curd over, then lay another layer of biscuits on top. Each layer is slightly smaller hence the pyramid shape

5. The important thing is to keep the soft biscuits closely packed together

6. Then cover the whole lot in the softly whipped cream. You could decorate with some sprinkled grated lemon peel

7. Chill for a few hours in the fridge and then cut and served like a moist cake. It was very good!

I shall keep you posted about the clotted cream.