Easy Scones

This is my favorite scone recipe. It’s easy to make from scratch and always delivers perfect scones that are light, tender, and fluffy.

My whole family loves this scone recipe. I share storage info below, but honestly, we’ve never needed it. The moment they come out of the oven, they disappear.

This is a basic scone recipe made with a short list of simple ingredients. The scones are perfect left plain and served by themselves or with butter and jam. It’s also an excellent recipe for adapting to your favorite mix-ins like berries, fresh fruit, or chocolate chips. I adapted this recipe for these blueberry scones.

Key Ingredients

• Flour: I stick to all-purpose flour for my scones. It consistently yields light and flaky results. For gluten-free scones, use your favorite all-purpose gluten-free flour.
• Butter: The secret to truly tender scones is very cold unsalted butter. So don’t take it out of the fridge too early. The same is true for drop biscuits and these buttermilk biscuits.
• Cream: I love traditional cream scones, so my master scone recipe takes inspiration from them and calls for a generous amount of heavy cream. It adds flavor, fat, and keeps them tender.
• Sugar: Use granulated sugar, coconut sugar, or honey. I especially love the flavor of honey for these and have shared tips for adjusting the recipe for honey instead of sugar below.
• Baking Powder: This adds some lift to the middles of our scones. Use fresh, aluminum-free baking powder for the best flavor. I like Bob’s Red Mill because it is what I find best for making my favorite pancake recipe, which also call for a generous amount of baking powder.
• Vanilla and Salt: These make them taste delicious and balance the flavor of the flour and baking powder. I highly recommend the vanilla!
• Optional Add-Ins: These are lovely plain, without anything added to the dough, but are really easy to adapt to your favorite scone mix-ins. Consider adding fresh berries, such as blueberries or raspberries, chopped strawberries, cherries, or peaches, dried fruit like raisins or cranberries, or a combination. Nuts and chocolate chips work, too. I especially love a mixture of regular and mini chocolate chips when making this recipe.

Find the full recipe with measurements below.

How to Make the Best Scones from Scratch

Tip 1: Cold is key. For light, flaky scones, think of them like biscuits or pie crust. Cold butter creates steam pockets in the hot oven, which gives the scones their signature tender, fluffy texture (as shown in our photo below). Use cold butter and make sure that your heavy cream is cold as well.

Tip 2: Don’t overwork the dough. When cutting the cold butter into the flour, leave some pieces the size of small peas. These will melt and puff up in the oven. You can use a pastry blender, also called a pastry cutter, to do this (like in my photo), or grate frozen butter using the large holes of a box grater into the flour. You can also pulse the mixture a few times in a food processor like I do when making homemade biscuits.

Tip 3: Chill before baking. For an extra guarantee of tender, flaky scones, chill them for 15 to 20 minutes before they go in the oven. Place the cut-out scones on a plate or small baking sheet (or whatever fits in your fridge), and refrigerate them.

Tip 4: Brush with cream and sugar. For a beautifully finished top, brush the scones with a little extra heavy cream and sprinkle them with sugar. Using a coarse sugar like turbinado or demerara will give them a lovely crunch and sparkle, but plain granulated sugar does the job, too.

More Scone Recipes