Scones recipe

In 1925 when my Great Grandmother married my Great Grandfather and moved to his farm in Sweetville, Ohio, she brought with her an old leather bag, which had belonged to her mother. When she got to the house, which sat beside a 100 year old pear tree–

Just kidding. Here's the recipe!

Ingredients

3.5 cups flour
2 tablespoons and 2 teaspoons of baking powder (8tsp)
1/2 cup sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
10 tablespoons butter (1 stick, and then two segments of the next stick)
1 cup milk
1/2 cup sour cream

Directions

Preheat the oven to 400ºF.
Sift flour, baking powder, sugar, and salt into a big bowl. Grate the butter into the mix.
Mix the milk and sour cream together and then pour it into the big bowl. Stir it in.
Grease two baking sheets with some more of the leftover stick of butter. Form the dough into little balls and squish them down onto the sheets.
If you're not super hungry you could brush them with an egg/milk wash right now.
Bake them for like 15 mins, or whenever they seem done. Internal temperature of a done scone is round about 200ºF.
Serve with butter, jam, clotted cream, or whatever you want, it's a free country.

Notes

You can flour your hands to see if that makes it easier to form the little scone balls, but I've never had good luck with that.
A stand mixer will make all of this much more fun and easy.
The egg brush thing has never made much difference to my enjoyment of these scones, but you might want to try it. It probably stops them drying out, or something, but I kinda like them a little drier, as a contrast to the disgusting amount of butter I slather them with.
You might have a bit of unmixed dry flour at the bottom of your mixer bowl when you've done mixing in the milk/cream – sometimes I'll throw a (small!) splash of milk on that to cheer it up and help it become part of the whole.
I adapted this recipe from a couple I found online, which maybe I would reference, except... it's scones... the basic recipe has been being made by Scottish people for millennia.

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