A Good Appetite
A cross between a scone, cake and cinnamon bun, this giant jam bun is a swirly, almond-scented delight.
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Melissa Clark’s obsession with British cream teas and 19th-century novels inspires many of her baked confections.
What do you call a scone crossed with a jam cake and a cinnamon roll?
The first time I tried it, I called it a Franken-scone. The pastry flattened, and the jam oozed like gloppy magma, burning at the edges of the pan. I had to resort to a butter knife to pry a tiny crumb from the baking sheet. And yet, from the first bite, the rich taste of butter, raspberry and caramel flooded my mouth. Maybe it wasn’t pretty, but I knew that with a few simple tweaks, this monstrosity could become something marvelous.
Recipe: Giant Jam Bun
The whole thing was inspired by Erin Gardner’s giant cinnamon roll scone, in which she swaps the usual yeast dough with an easy-to-make scone pastry. She then forms it into a giant pinwheel and slices it into wedges before baking.
I wondered what would happen if I used jam instead of a brown sugar filling. Might this be the solution to one of my lifelong teatime obsessions: baking jam directly into a scone so it wouldn’t be dry?
This culinary fixation had already yielded two recipes. In one, I added raisin-like dried strawberries to a scone loaf to create sticky, jam-like pockets. In another, I gave scones the cookie treatment, plopping homemade plum compote into thumbprints, yielding cornmeal plum scones.
Those recipes are delightful, but my work wasn’t done. I wanted more jamminess. By adopting Erin’s pinwheel shape, I hoped to stuff even more jam into the dough.
Calibrating the amount and variety of jam turned out to be the tricky part. Too much, or using a thin fruit preserve or a jelly, produced a leaky, burned mess. I knew I needed a thick, dense jam, added sparingly.
What I hadn’t dared hope, though, was that the moisture in the jam would change the texture of the scone so much. Instead of dry or crumbly, it turned thrillingly tender and deeply buttery. It was like a spiraled jam cake, which I played up by drizzling a citrusy icing on top.
My confection isn’t a scone any more than it’s a cake or a roll. I decided to call it something else entirely — a giant jam bun, which I hope doesn’t make this swirly treat sound too threatening. Because, although I may have created a monster, it is beautiful at heart.
Melissa Clark has been writing her column, A Good Appetite, for The Times’s Food section since 2007. She creates recipes for New York Times Cooking, makes videos and reports on food trends. She is the author of 45 cookbooks, and counting. More about Melissa Clark
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