Preheat oven 400°; line baking sheet with parchment paper

Prepare streusel. See recipe here: https://kitchenportfolio.wordpress.com/2014/08/17/coconut-streusel-cocoa-muffins/

Combine dry ingredients:

• 3 cups White Lily^® bleached, all-purpose flour (you won’t regret using this soft-wheat flour for baking delicate items like scones)
• 1/3 cup sugar
• 2.5 teaspoons baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 teaspoon salt

Cut in 3/4 cup cold butter cut in small cubes. I tried a pastry cutter once and hated it, having grown up using my mother’s old 3-tined fork—not a traditional pastry fork, but some old black thing with thin tines. So, I often use a table fork to cut in shortening, but today I just used my hands, rubbing the butter and flour mixture between my fingers until it was pretty well combined. Don’t worry too much about uniformity here; larger chunks of butter are okay.

Stir in 1-2 teaspoons lemon or orange zest. Lemon is good with blueberries; orange is good with cranberries.

Stir in 1 cup dried blueberries (or fresh blueberries or dried cranberries). Stirring them in now coats each berry with flour, keeping them separate throughout the rest of the mixing. Trying to stir them in after the wet ingredients are added will be too hard and will burst too many berries.

Stir in 1 cup buttermilk until most of the flour is combined, then lightly knead in the rest by hand. Like all quick bread doughs, you don’t want to overwork it, so don’t worry if your unbaked scones are a little rough-looking. You can see the cracks in my unbaked scones. Better an imperfect scone with a tender crumb.

On a floured surface, pat the dough into a circle—two 6 inch circles for very small scones or one larger 8-10 inch circle for fewer, bigger scones. Just don’t pat the dough any less than 3/4″ thick. Cut the circle(s) into eighths with a pastry scraper/chopper (mine has a cutting edge). The goal when cutting scone or biscuit dough is to cut straight down without squashing the dough, leaving a cut edge that will allow the dough to rise high.

Place scones on parchment-lined baking sheet and brush tops with milk or cream for browning and for adhering streusel, if using. Sprinkle streusel to cover tops of scones. You will make a mess of your baking sheet, which is another good reason to use parchment paper. Parchment paper used to be such a specialty item that you had to grab it whenever you found it, often in a boutique baking shop. Now you can get it in any grocery store and you should definitely always have some on hand. You will think of ways to use it and save on a lot of cleanup.

Bake at 400° for 15-20 minutes. Cool on wire rack. These don’t really need to be split and buttered, but you could, or you could go all afternoon tea and have clotted cream.