Our home smelled gorgeous with the aroma of burning garlic. Fresh dungeoness crab salad over avocado halves for starters, instant spuds with extra butter, a nice bottle of wine- all nicely laid out on the dinner table, ready for their (festive) demise. Everything about our Christmas Eve dinner seemed complete.
But as Dad lifted the foil off of his prized garlic-rubbed roast beef, he said in his usual as-a-matter-of-a-fact kind of way, that dessert was in order. Then he poured the juices and drippings from the rotisserie machine into a pot of au jus, as we all gave him a wide-eyed oh-no-you-didn't! look.
He carried on, ignorant of our death glares. "Like pie. Or ice cream!"
To which mom interjected: "but we asked you! If you needed anything from the store!"
"Noooooo," he hummed, as he stirred the pot. But we all knew that she did ask him, and that he just forgot.
It happens every year on Thanksgiving and Christmas - he'll want pie, he won't want pie, then he'll decide that he DOES want the pie, mid-dinner. And it was (usually) my job to run to the store before 7 o'clock, fight my way into the bakery corner at the nearby Safeway's, and pick up whatever pie was left.
But this time, we had a little problem. It was already a quarter past six, and we were just sitting down for dinner. We crossed our fingers and hoped that he knew of this, and chowed down.
"Maybe ice cream might be better," Dad said inbetween bites. "Something light."
We pretended to not hear anything, and tried to steer the conversation from dessert. Work, school, boyfriends, other people, how we managed to eat a hundred bucks worth of Mexican food on Twiggy's birthday (to which he pointed at me and said "it's because you drink too much!") -anything but dessert. But it was useless. Once we finished dinner and cleared our plates, he brought out his shoes.
"Come on," he said to Little One. "Go get your keys."
Little One scowled. "But nothing's open! It's CHRISTMAS EVE!!!"
"We'll find something," he said, and ushered her out the door.
But we all knew that they won't be coming back with anything promising. Maybe ice cream bars from the liquor store, but that's about it. And nothing is as sad as a grown man who was denied dessert.
So I started the oven and scoured the fridge for ingredients. We just had a holiday dinner so there were plenty of butter and milk in the fridge - and simple scones seemed like the answer to Dad's rather capricious sweet tooth (plus, that's the only dessert I can make from the top of my head). We also had some fruits that looked like ginormo kumquats (that my Mom called Mayalsian sweet lemons. Anybody care to clarify?). So I chopped up the butter, curdled the milk with some squished kumquats, and chopped up a handful of kumquats to make a quick preserve. Everything went quick from there. In no time, the scones were in the oven, and the kumquats were jellying.
That's when Dad and Little one came home- and Little One was clearly exhausted. "Safeway closes at 7, and we got there at 7:10! Then we went to CVS and they didn't have anything. THEN we went to 7-11 and this was all they had!" she said, as she pulled out a dented pint of Haagen Daz vanilla ice cream. I was expecting them to come home with some chocolate covered ice cream bars - but this was perfect. We took the hot, fresh-out-of-the-oven scones, dropped a scoop of ice cream over it, and drizzled it with kumquat jelly. Dad's face brightened. "Fancy! A la mode!" he said in a sing-song way.
He gave his plate a quick glance before sticking his fork in it. "But not enough ice cream," he added, and dropped another scoopful on his plate, which was now a melted orange creme mess. "Now this - THIS is how you end dinner."
Bitter sweet hot jelly oozes together with the ice cream to create something that sort of reminds you of orange creme ice cream, only fancier. And the crunchy scones just makes it grand.
This dessert is very tweakable and fun to play with - today, I made the scones with sunflower seeds and turbinado sugar, and the jelly with meyer lemon peel, brown sugar, and cloves.
Walnut Scones A La Mode with Kumquat Coulis
Makes 6 servings
simple scones
1 1/2 cups flour
3 tbsp sugar
1 1/4 tsps baking powder
1/4 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp sea salt
6 tbsp frozen butter, cut into chunks
1/2 cup milk
1 tbsp kumquat juice (sub with white vinegar or lemon juice)
2 tbsp chopped walnuts
kumquat jelly
1/2 cup kumquats
sugar
water
vanilla ice cream (Haagen Daz is fine and dandy!)
1. Preheat oven to 425 F. Combine flour, sugar, baking soda, and baking powder into a bowl and whisk together with a fork.
2. In a small bowl, combine kumquat juice and milk and let curdle. Set aside.
3. Chop up kumquats and throw into a small sauce pan. Pour in water until covered, and bring to a boil over medium heat.
4. Throw in butter chunks and a pinch of salt into the bowl of flour, and using your hands, work the butter into the flour until corn-mealy. Leave some butter chunks here and there. Mix in chopped walnuts with a fork.
5. Pour in curdled milk and mix to combine (don't over mix!) - you will have a very sticky batter. Flour your working surface and plop out your dough. Fold and shape into a rectangle and cut into 6 large triangles.
6. Pop into the oven for 10~15 minutes. When golden and puffy, remove from the oven and let cool for 5 minutes.
7. While the scones are baking (multi-task here!), take the kumquat mixture off heat, and measure. Add 3/4 worth that volume of sugar (e.g., for 1 cup of kumquat-liquid, add 3/4 cup of sugar). Cook for 20 minutes or until jellied (you can read up on the freezer technique here).
8. Scoop some ice cream over the warm scone, and drizzle with warm jelly.
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