The first was the recipe for Peppered Pear and Goat Cheese Scones. The tang of the goat cheese, the sweetness of the pears and the spiciness of the black pepper come together for one of the tastiest savory scones I've ever had. They get their moisture from yogurt. The recipe calls for plain yogurt cut with some milk to thin it out, but I had some homemade yogurt on hand and as it is thinner than the stuff you get in the grocery store, I just used a bit more yogurt.
I don't know if they are better than the black pepper bacon scones in The Pastry Queen, because they have, well, BACON. But these are darned good and make a perfect snack or savory breakfast.
The second thing I made was the Sour Cream Fig Spirals. I am obsessed with figs. Obsessed. I spent a week pondering giving up figs after my friend, Sheila, told me that figs have dead wasps in them. Her niece or nephew did a report on figs for school and discovered that wasps will crawl inside the flower, get stuck and as the fruit forms and ripens the wasps become a part of the fruit. I read a lot of wasp/fig reports online and I finally just decided that I love figs so much I don't care. Plus, I eat meat so what the heck. But I digress.
The book has a recipe for rosemary fig spread, but I can't abide rosemary. Instead, I chopped some fresh figs, mixed in some dried cranberries drizzled a bit of honey over the top, added a splash of water and simmered on the stove top until the figs broke down. Pulse in a food processor until finely chopped.
The "cookie" dough is made with whole wheat flour and finely ground toasted walnuts with cream cheese. The dough was extremely sticky and I had to toss in more flour than what the recipe recommended to get it to come together properly. Once patted out onto a floured piece of parchment or waxed paper, spread the dough with the fig jam and roll up. Mine did not look pretty like the picture. I need to practice my pinwheel technique and I think I had substantially more filling than the recipe recommends, but who wouldn't want more figs? These need to be cold to slice, so I refrigerated the rolled dough over night. By the time the coffee was made this morning, the oven was warm and 12 minutes later I had delicious savory cookies for breakfast. I had to foist them upon my neighbor, because I would have eaten all of them before noon.
