Breakfast From Your Herb Garden: Cinnamon Basil and Blackberry Scones

Gluten Free Cinnamon Basil Blackberry Scones

As many of you have read my herb garden disappeared off my porch last week. At first I was angry and then I called my mother-in-law. She has heard many of my grips over the years and she is always a reassuring presence when I am upset. When my mother passed away 9 days after my oldest was born she quickly stepped in as my support system and has remained there ever since. Immediately after hearing about the theft of my herbs she headed to the Farmer's market. She showed up at my house with a big herb pot overflowing with herbs. Somehow she had gotten the whole pot for 5 dollars. Never underestimate the ability of a West Virginian woman to be able to haggle, it really is an art. She apparently also shared the theft of my herbs to everyone selling plants and came to my house with more than enough plants to start a great new garden plus the pot that was already started. The man that sold the herb garden that was already potted had done a great job starting the pot, but it needed to be cut back, trained and nothing was labeled. So that has been my pet project this week. I have Googled and learned more about uses for herbs than I ever knew before. It turns out that I have over 15 different herbs in the pot, some of which I have never used before. So this week you will be seeing a lot of recipes using fresh herbs. This morning I tried a new recipe for Blackberry Scones with Cinnamon Basil.

This recipe has 12 ingredients. It takes 35 minutes of total time, 10 minutes of which is active. I did make a few changes to the original recipe. The largest change I made was to use gluten free all purpose flour. I did not add the salt since I find with gluten free flour I do not need it. The second biggest change that I made was to greatly reduce the amount of butter. The original recipe uses 1 1/4 cups of butter. While this would be delicious, it would be too much butter for gluten free baking (gluten free recipes tend to need the butter reduced). I also wanted to make it a better breakfast option and reducing the butter to one stick (1/2 cup) allowed for far less total fat content. In addition I used non-fat Greek yogurt. Finally, my dough was a lot stickier than the pictures in the original post. This is normal for gluten free baking, just make sure to roll the blackberries in a small amount of flour before adding them to the batter to keep them from bleeding and turning the dough purple.

My husband loved these. Since I made so many changes they are basically biscuits, not traditional scones. However, even my kids loved the scones and didn't notice that they were eating basil in a breakfast food. I would suggest that using strawberries would be an even better flavor combination. There is something about strawberries and basil that seem to go hand in hand. Overall, this recipe was a great way to use fresh herbs and could be changed to include other types of basil or berries.

For the recipe go to Blackberry Scones with Cinnamon Basil.