Maple Pecan Scones (Pioneer Woman)

**Another great addition from Megan for our Cooking Through PW Cooks Adventure.**

Let's start out this post by explaining a little bit of my pickiness about scones. I think it comes from working at a coffee shop in high school that had the best scones. I have no idea what it is that makes them so perfect. I can't stand an overly crumbly scone. Or one that tastes just like a cookie. Or one that has virtually no taste at all. Needless to say, when I embarked on the adventure of making these scones I was excited but ready to be disappointed.

Here's the ingredients:
I used 1% milk instead of whole milk for our health's sake.

Dry ingredients:
Cut in the butter. I always get excited when I get to cut the butter into something because that usually means the final product will be full of buttery goodness. Yum!
Cream and Egg
Everything mixed together ready for formation into scones. Ree said not to worry if your mixture is very crumbly. But I felt like mine was a little too crumbly because I ran into some issues later on.
Form the pile of crumbs into a dough with your hands and then roll it out.

The process of taking the cut scones off of the cutting board and transferring them to the baking sheet was ridiculous to say the least. Most of them crumbled all over the place. I was worried at this point. But I took some time and reformed the scones with my hands after they were on the baking sheet. That worked really well. Next time, though, I need to figure out a way to make them less crumbly at this point because I wasted way too much dough. Probably 1.5 scones worth.

Here's the aftermath:
Now the best part. The icing. This icing is especially delicious because it has maple flavoring and a splash of coffee in it.

Wonderfully golden (but not overdone) scones!
The finished product:

I decided to do a little experiment. I love warm scones so I assumed these would be best straight out of the oven. The one I ate straight out of the oven was too crumbly for my taste. It needed to have more integrity in the dough. The recipe technically says to wait until they're completely cool, put icing on, and then eat. Surprisingly, the cooled scone was much better. I think the ingredients were able to bond together more and form a less crumbly scone. Perfect amount of sweetness in the scone and the icing.

Seriously delicious. I will make these again for sure.