Morning
Mornings at Violet are my favorite time. I am a morning person; I always have been. I love anything baked in the morning for breakfast, and I would easily eat cake for breakfast every day if I didn’t know any better. I do keep a jar of my quinoa granola at home and love to serve it with a good goat’s or sheep’s milk yogurt as much as with cow’s milk yogurt. Many days I simply have a banana or a piece of sourdough or rye toast for my own breakfast. Sometimes it’s a boiled egg. At Violet we serve generous slices of sourdough with salted butter, seasonal jam, and raw almond butter with sea salt. We get a cold-pressed almond butter from Cornwall that is so sweet and almondy that I prefer it to a toasted variety.
My favorite recipe in this section is possibly the cinnamon bun—a quick and easy bun that melts in your mouth. Every Sunday my friends Sylvia and Jo and I get cinnamon buns and coffees from the bakery and head up to Hackney Marshes with our dogs. A long walk in the wild fields that are also home to many of the ingredients I like to forage for is the perfect way to end the hectic London week.
The recipes in this section are a selection of breakfast items from across a year at Violet. I have included my favorite fruit and muffin or scone pairings from each season, but you can of course substitute here and there where appropriate, depending on what is best at the market.
Buckwheat, apple, and crème fraîche scones
Buckwheat flour is one of my favorite flours to bake with. It has a very strong flavor, so it works best when mixed with other flours. It is also gluten free. In this recipe I’ve added a combination of spelt and oat flours to bolster the buckwheat. Spelt and oat are flavorful, but when mixed with buckwheat, they take a backseat. The spelt has enough gluten to carry the scones and yet leave them with a very appealing crumbly texture. The grated apple is sweet and moist and marries perfectly with the crème fraîche. For more on flours, read my pantry section (see page 224).
Makes 12 large scones 150g (1½ cups) fine spelt flour
(see page 40), plus more for rolling
100g (⅔ cup) whole grain spelt flour
175g (1⅔ cups) oat flour
225g (1⅓ cups plus 2 tablespoons)
buckwheat flour
1½ teaspoons baking soda
1 tablespoon baking powder
½ teaspoon cinnamon
2 teaspoons salt
100g (½ cup) light or dark
muscovado sugar
1 tablespoon orange zest
1 teaspoon lemon zest
250g (1 cup plus 1 tablespoon)
cold unsalted butter, cut into
1-cm (½-inch) cubes
300g (1¼ cups) crème fraîche
500g (18 ounces) grated apple
(5 or 6 tart apples such as
Discovery, Gravenstein, Cox’s
Orange Pippin, or Granny Smith)
1 egg beaten with 2 tablespoons
milk, for the egg wash
Preheat the oven to 200°C/390°F (180°C/355°F convection). Line a baking sheet with parchment paper.
Combine all the dry ingredients in a mixing bowl along with the zests and whisk together well. Using a pastry cutter, the back of a fork, or a mixer, cut in the cubes of butter until they are the size of large peas.
Stir together the crème fraîche and grated apple. Mix this into the flour and butter mixture until it barely holds together. Turn out on to a flour-dusted surface and pat roughly into a square. Let the dough rest for 5 minutes, then flatten it to about 2.5cm (1 inch) thick with a rolling pin. Fold it in half so that you have a rectangle. Then fold it in half again into a small square. Let it rest for 7 minutes, then roll it into a square about 4cm (1½ inches) thick.
Use a sharp knife to cut the square into three long pieces. Cut each log into two and then each square into two triangles. Place on the lined baking sheet (or wrap in plastic wrap and store in the freezer), brush with the egg wash, and bake for about 35 minutes, or until golden brown.
These are best eaten on the day you bake them.
Copyright © 2015 by Claire Ptak, Foreword by Alice Waters. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
