Could vegan scones be actually edible?

Recently I have been on a coffee kick. It is very strange, I wake up in the morning and all I can think and crave is a little cup of espresso. I grew up drinking coffee, I used to love coffee, until one day I realized that coffee did not make me feel well: it makes me jittery, hyper, a nervous wreck and when drank in large quantities gives me the worst headache ever. So about ten years ago I stopped drinking coffee. However, after a couple of trips to the Old World, I couldn't resist it anymore.

Anyway, this past week I had a little cup of espresso at Sweetleaf LIC and tried their vegan chocolate chip scone. Ever since then I've been obsessed about trying to make my own.



Luckily I found a recipe for Ginger Chocolate Chunk Scones in the Post Punk Kitchen website. The PPK has become a wonderful resource for vegan recipes and inspiration, and because of it I've been dabbling in vegan cuisine much more than ever before. Anyway, by now I have sort of given myself three opportunities to play around with these scones.

The first time I made them the batter ended up a little moister than I thought it should be, although I was pretty sure I had measured the liquid ingredients correctly. As a result my first batch of scones didn't hold shape very well. Because I didn't use all the batter at once (I only wanted to bake about 6 scones) I refrigerated the rest of the batter and made the rest of the scones latter on. On the bright side, by then the batter had acquired a thicker consistency, but I think also by letting the batter sit in the refrigerator caused the second batch of scones to be a little heavier, denser and without a crisp (and here is probably my lesson about over-mixing...)

This morning was my third attempt at baking these scones. I chose to cut down the ground ginger to only one tablespoon and then add about a quartet cup of chopped crystallized ginger. The batter seemed to be the right consistency right of the bat, which was nice (no over-mixing this time!). Also, I've discovered that using an oven thermometer is essential (for me at least) - my crappy oven doesn't warm up as much as it should, so by now I've figure out that I have to put the dial above the 400 mark in order to be able to bake at that temperature.

So the short answer to this conundrum is: yes! I can't say for every vegan scone out there, but at least the ones resulting from this particular recipe are not only edible, but delicious (I in fact prefer them now to the regular non-vegan kind). They are tasty, not too sweet, aromatic (because of all that good ginger!) and go extremely well with a little cup of homemade Italian espresso.