The Sweetest Thing

I know what you're thinking. What is this thing of beauty before my eyes, this tasty delight that so will soothe my mind through slumber and lead me to a night so heavy with soft thoughts to cool my aching mind?

Sometimes when I describe food, I look at it from a Shakespearean standpoint.

This is the vanilla bean scone, my new favorite snack.



I've eaten them before. Vanilla bean anything is welcome in mah belly, but for some reason the scones I've had in the past haven't been good. They've been more mealy and thick with a bad bean to glaze ratio. Case in point, the Starbucks version of the vanilla bean scone. What was once a a decent scone is now rendered to yogurt covering everywhere.

How am I to compose a haiku/ode to the scone if I cannot see it? If the yogurt has coated it to be unrecognizable?

On Saturday, I was fiddling around with some Funfetti cookie ingredients at Albertsons. Sometimes I think I can bake. Most of the time I bypass the aisle of cooking oils and mixes because it's like that time in grade school when I decided to get into art and bought over $40 of craft supplies and did absolutely nothing with them but stare at how attractive the supplies were in their packaging. These cooking supplies are the same thing. They'll look nice in the fridge, but will I bake? Maybe. Possibly. Probably? Hardly. My handheld shopping cart held some eggs, Funfetti mix, and a new frosting tube from Pillsbury that sold me, like all Pillsbury items, simply by including a tiny picture of Poppin Fresh on the packaging. Then I passed through the bakery to get to the cash registers (a better alternative to passing through the booze aisle and attempting to explain to my cashier why I was, yet again, buying champagne at 11am) and out of habit checked out the scone selection. It was the usual uninspiring group of coconut (why. why was this here.) and blueberry and hold up. Vanilla bean with yogurt drizzling.

I picked up the container and examined the scones up close. They were lightly drizzled, not coated. Fresh until April 8th. Prominent bean specks within vision.

MINE.

Did I just get eerily territorial with scones? Of course. I'm usually like this with cookies only (get away! just kidding I share...sometimes), but I got home and bit into the first moist and ultra-soft scone and tasted no mealiness, no overwhelming chewing to get to the good part. All I could taste was the sweetness, the wholeness of the scone.

The container, loaded with hmm, 20 scones?

Empty the next day.



Observe, the most important property of the vanilla bean scone. Often the most overlooked part in the quest to coat the sucker with icing. Nay I say, put in the vanilla beans liberally and freely. Don't be afraid of the goodness that they offer. Embrace it.

Right here is when I would insert a recipe for these scones, but c'mon. I'm not a cooking blog. You saw what I did up there. When faced with some delicious pre-made confection from the bakery department at a chain grocery store, I went for it and dropped all of my planned baking ingredients in the process. No true chef does that.

Or do they? I swear, these scones have the power to shift mindsets.



Coated with icing
Cool vanilla bean temptress
You mmmmake me happppy.

-haiku to the vanilla bean scone, with the last line written as a nod to Ben Stiller's Simple Jack in Tropic Thunder.

I am the crazy scone lady.

Love to you all,
Heather