Buttermilk Honey Scones with Rose-Strawberry Jam

I’m finding more beauty in the crumbs, the coffee stains that ring a mug. I found an old textbook about gender and saw the pages, dog-eared and speckled in burns and blood, from a paper cut and ashes dusted aimlessly from my cigarette.

I used to read under grapevines and now I sleep twelve hours some days.

I used to speak Spanish in a timid accent and now I don’t speak it at all.

I used to bite my nails, but I stopped that a long time ago.

I read about 6 sisters who changed the world and I used to think I could, too. I told my mother I was never going to speak to her again, and now I watch the news with her, nursing coffees that grow cold and conversations that became keep memories of her mother alive and warm. She opened a box in a room she turned into a cat infirmary yesterday morning. Inside were thirty-seven napkins, hand-stitched and embroidered in yarn, lace, and scraps of satin.  How delicate they were; carefully folded and not very well made. They did the job and we moved on to other topics, like how my mother isn’t very good at tennis and I’m not very good at forgiving. If my brother was having a boy or a girl. How my mother loves the smell of rosewater and hates how many ants she found in the windowsill in the kitchen.

How many years its been since I last celebrated my birthday with her.

I live for those moments, those mornings. The innocence and the redemption. The fog hands dully until about nine in the morning. It burns off, I go to work. She sits with her cats, with Milo and her Labrador retriever. She watches crime documentaries and lights candles in the heat. She went shopping the other morning and brought home some roses. Strawberries were on sale and she had never seen honeycomb before. So I made her these scones as a thank you for taking me back in. So close to home, so different than who I was. I used to read under grapevines and they’re still there. Giving second chances and strangling the chicken wire fence that surrounds the house.

Buttermilk Honey Scones with Rose-Strawberry Jam

Ingredients for the Scones

• 2/3 cup buttermilk
• 1 egg
• 1 TB vanilla extract
• ¼ cup honey
• 3 cup flour
• ½ sugar
• 1 TB baking powder
• ½ TB cornstarch
• ½ ts salt
• 8 TB butter, cubed and cold
• 3 TB honeycomb, cut into cubes for topping

Directions for Scones

1. Preheat oven to 450*F and line a baking sheet with parchment paper
2. Whisk together buttermilk, egg, vanilla, and honey, set aside
3. Sift together all dry ingredients into a mixing bowl and transfer mixture into your food processor
4. Add butter, pulse to combine until fat is the size of peas
5. With motor running, add liquid through feeding tube
6. Turn dough onto a floured work surface and pat into a round
7. Cut into 8 triangles, and pat edges to be clean
8. Place on baking sheet and bake for 13-18 minutes or until puffed and golden brown
9. Top with honeycom

Ingredients for Rose-Strawberry Jam

• ½ pint of strawberries, hulled and halved
• 1 cup sugar
• Juice of 2 lemons
• 2 TB fruit pectin
• 2 TB rose water
• Zest of one lemo

Directions for Rose-Strawberry Jam

1. In a medium-sized saucepan, combine strawberries, sugar, and juice. Heat on medium.
2. Stir occasionally (I like to use a wooden spoon) so that the mixture does not burn, but you want enough heat that the juices bleed from the berries and the sugar and lemon juice condense slightly
3. Allow to boil for a good 2 or 3 minutes
4. Add your fruit pectin and stir vigorously for a few seconds to combine
5. Resume your boil for another minute
6. Take off heat, stir in zest and rose water
7. Jam will continue to thicken as it cools, when slightly warm to the touch, you can put in your jar. This recipe makes one pint of jam and is not a proper canning technique, but a quick jam recipe
8. Store in fridge, use often and plentifully