Give this girl a swirl!

This book ‘Full and Plenty’ by the talented food journalist Maura Laverty belonged to my late grand aunt Peggy. Nearly all of my memories of Peggy feature crusty white bread, slices of butter and real ham. Not a lady that messed about with food. She has loads of recipes written all over the inside cover in her beautiful handwriting and has mass cards and newspaper cuttings marking her favourite pages.

The recipes are so vague, I never really made anything from it before, they all say things like ‘skin the rabbit in the usual way...’ or ‘skim the cream from the top of the bucket of milk’. But I was looking through it at the weekend and found some gorgeous recipes that I had to try.
The first is Strawberry Swirls. A scone dough rolled lovingly around sugared strawberries. I know we’re nowhere near strawberry season but I’m trying to induce Summer around here.

They’re very easy and taste incredible warm from the oven. They’re nicest the day they’re made but they reheated well for breakfast the following morning. Also the whole house smelled so gorgeous, there’s no scented candle can beat freshly baked dough and strawberries. I added a passionfruit icing for some pazzazz, even though I’m not sure Peggy would have approved!

Strawberry Swirls

Ingredients
3/4 lb plain flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 tbsp sugar
3 tablespoons butter
2/3 cup milk (I used greek yogurt)
I also added 1 egg to enrrrrich the dough as The Two Fat Ladies would say


1/2 lb strawberries, sliced and sprinkled with 2 tbsps sugar
2 tbsp butter

Method

• Make the dough by rubbing the butter into the dry ingredients, add the milk & egg until it comes together to form a dough.
• Next roll out the dough to 1/4 inch thick and dot with the 2 tbsps butter.
• Cover the dough with the strawberries.

• Roll it all up like a Swiss roll and cut into 12 slices.
• Sit each one into a buttered muffin pan and bake for 25 mins at 180 degrees.
  

If you want to make the incredible icing just sieve 50g icing sugar into a bowl. Scoop the inside of one passionfuit into the sieve and stir until all of the juice is out. I just ate the seeds but you could add them,they're not the prettiest are they? They look a bit like frog spawn. Stir in 2tsp boiling water and drizzle the icing over the buns. Gorgeous!

Lilly x

Ok one more photo..