Fast forward to 2011 and Comic Relief it still with us, and as fab as ever. Tomorrow is comic relief day, and for once I decided to cook in honour of it, and something a bit unusual to boot. A spicy - and very red - variation on my Mum's cheese scones.
Red Devil Cheese Scone Noses |
The most long running theme of Comic Relief has to be the red nose, and in fact the whole enterprise is often referred to as Red Nose Day - or RND as it's now cropping up on Twitter. So what, I figured about Red Nose Scones? But not just plain old red noses, but spicy, hot, cheesy red noses. To the kitchen! Actually, I had no way of making any any red food at all at this point, bar adding vast quantities of tomato puree, but luckily my neighbour Angela was happy to share some food colouring that she had spare, so I was in business.
But back to the recipe. Really simple, First here's the cheese scone recipe, sans Comic Reliefness ...
"Red Devil" Cheese Scone Noses
by Rich Osborne, March 17th, 2011A spicey twist on a classic cheese scone recipe, perfect for comedy events. Should take about or so to prepare, , so .
Ingredients
- 450g plain flour
- ½ teaspoon salt
- 3 teaspoons of baking powder
- 1 teaspoon mustard powder
- 200g strong cheddar cheese, grated
- 100g butter, thickly diced
- milk to mix, up to ½ pint
To make my RND Red Devils you just need to make the following additions:
- 4 teaspoons of red food colouring (Less than four might well work, but I had four, so I used four. They do need to be REALLY red, after all)
- ½ teaspoon cayenne pepper
- 1 dash hot sauce, e.g. tabasco or similar
- 1 tablespoon of tomato puree
Mix all the dry ingredients in a food processor, then add the butter and process briefly. Add the cheese, process briefly again and then add the food coluring, the hot sauce and the tomato puree. Then start to add the milk with the machine running until the mixture forms a firm ball inside the machine.
Shape into walnut shaped balls and bake in a fan oven at 180° for 15 minutes.
Cool on a wire rack.
Shape into walnut shaped balls and bake in a fan oven at 180° for 15 minutes.
Cool on a wire rack.
What you should end up with is something like this:
Front lot ready for the oven, back lot are baked already and now cooling |
I think they would be fab split in half whilst still warm, and served with cold butter, especially a chive or garlic butter, but they need to go to work tomorrow to join the other baked goods being sold to raise money for charity. Of course everyone else will be producing sweet cakes and the like, so chances are my little red devils might be coming home again with me - but then again you never know. They are damn tasty, and on comic relief day anything might happen ....