Irish Cream Scones with Raspberry Butterscotch Lace Topping

Sometimes Rose surprises me.  After baking through two and one-half of her cookbooks, I think I have a pretty good idea of what will appeal to her.  But I nearly missed the recipe for the raspberry butterscotch sauce, seemingly just a little throwaway recipe that you can make if you want to gild the lily.  I love scones in their natural state--I don't need more butter or jam to enjoy them, so I almost didn't make this sauce.  Now I want to eat it every day.

But first, the scones.  As instructed, I used a mixture of bread and all-purpose flour (both King Arthur, whose bread flour has a higher protein content than General Mills).  These are the easiest scones you'll ever make because you don't have to work the butter into the flour.

Just mix a lot of cream in with the dry ingredients.  That's it!  You don't even have to knead it.

Besides having no butter, the only thing that makes these scones slightly unusual is that a few grams of honey are in the dough.  I couldn't taste honey in the final product, but I'm not a super taster.

I'm showing these pictures in reverse chronological order, since I made the sauce on Friday night and the scones early Saturday morning.  A cup or so of good-looking frozen raspberries first had to thaw and then give up some of their juices.

Oh, another reason I almost skipped this sauce--it requires mashing and straining of raspberries to get a few tablespoons of juice and puree, leaving the mashed-up raspberries pretty useless.  An expensive sauce, too--the small bag of organic raspberries cost nearly $5.  But although these are very good reasons to skip this sauce, please don't!

Just a small amount of caramel-y sauce magic, made with butter, cream, and Muscovado sugar.  More expensive ingredients.  Is this a $10 sauce yet?

And here we are.  This innocent-looking sauce will make you want to forget the scones and just scoop up the sauce.  And remember, this is coming from an aficionada of The Naked Scone.  When people showed up for their doughnuts, coffee, and scones, I was torn between hospitality ("Don't forget the raspberry sauce for your scone!") and selfishness ("Oh, the red stuff--it's just ketchup.")  Even though the good angel won out, there was still some sauce left, which I'm doling out to myself in small amounts to make it last.  I've discovered that one of the best things in the world is Greek yogurt, fresh raspberries, and this raspberry butterscotch sauce.  (I never got to the lacy part of it).

The sauce is perfectly balanced, with just enough sweetness to tame the raspberries, but enough tartness from the berries to make it fresh, and a rich depth of flavor from the Muscovado sugar.  Make the scones--they're very good (although probably not quite as good as the cream cheese scones, their ease of execution puts them at the top of the list for a quick treat), but please don't ignore the raspberry sauce.