How To Make the Best Blueberry Scones

Given the choice between a muffin or a scone at a bakery, I would choose the scone every single time. I love that scones are less sweet and more buttery than their cakey muffin cousins, and I find them a lovely partner to my morning coffee or tea.

Scones often have the reputation of being dry, but if made properly they’re anything but. Here’s how to make buttery, flaky, American-style scones loaded with plump, sweet blueberries and a kiss of lemon. And yes, they’re as good as they sound.

These four ingredients are crucial to making the very best blueberry scones.

• Blueberries: Whether you use fresh or frozen blueberries, go for bigger ones that will hold their shape. Tiny wild blueberries will burst easily and make purple-blue streaks in the dough. They’ll still taste good, but they won’t look as nice.
• Butter: Cold butter melts and turns to steam in the hot oven, creating a nice, flaky texture. Keep the butter cold by grating it into the flour mixture and then working quickly to bring the dough together.
• Cream: Heavy cream adds moisture and fat to the dough, which keeps the scones tender and gives them a rich flavor.
• Lemon: There’s a double-dose of lemon zest in this recipe; it’s mixed into the dough and rubbed into sugar to be sprinkled on top. The lemon adds brightness and really makes the blueberry flavor sing, so don’t skip it.

The secret to the best American-style scones is to use a technique similar to making flaky biscuits (ironically enough, what the British call scones are baked goods very similar to American biscuits). Here, I’ll show you how to implement it when making blueberry scones.

1. Grate the butter. Grating cold butter on a box grater into the flour mixture gives you perfectly-sized butter flecks that are easy to incorporate into the dough quickly.
2. Fold the dough. After patting the dough into a rectangle and pressing the blueberries into part of it, you’ll use another technique borrowed from flaky biscuits: Fold the dough into thirds like a letter, which creates flaky layers and also berry-streaked layers, in this case. Pat the dough into a rectangle again, then cut it into eight triangles. I love this shape for scones because they can all be cut out at once and there’s no need to gather and re-roll scraps.
3. Freeze the unbaked scones. Finish the scones by brushing them with heavy cream and sprinkling them with lemon sugar, then freeze them for 30 minutes while the oven heats up. Freezing them firms up the butter so that the scones bake up nice and flaky. If you don’t want to bake them right away, freeze them solid and store them in a zip-top bag. The frozen scones can be baked directly from the freezer for the same amount of time, which means a warm breakfast pastry is possible with zero effort besides turning on the oven.