Dark Chocolate & Sour Cherry Scone Cookies

Scone cookies are my new favorite thing to bake. Delicious morsels with the butteriness of a scone and the chewiness of a cookie, scone cookies are a versatile twist on old standbys.
I'd never heard of them until recently, but was intrigued by the concept, so I did some research to figure out just what separates these beauties from the average scone. It's actually quite simple: There are no eggs, and the dough is rendered flaky with butter, rich with cream, and chewy with an extra couple of spoonfuls of sugar.

The process for making scone cookies is similar to that of traditional scones: stir together the dry ingredients, cut in the butter, and stir in the cream. That's it! The dough is a bit wetter and stickier than scone dough, so it's best to scoop it out with a spoon like cookie dough, rather than roll them out and cut them like scones.
Once you've got the basic recipe down pat, the world is your oyster when it comes to jazzing them up with flavors and additions. You could keep them simple like our Buttered Wheat and Honey Scones and depend on toppings such as whipped cream, flavored yogurt, or homemade jam to make them especially good.
If you can't handle gluten, you could change up the recipe with gluten-free flours like we did in our Gluten Free Raspberry Scones. Since gluten-free flours generally result in a wetter, stickier dough like scone cookies, this recipe works well with the adaptation.

Scone cookies are lovely with the addition of fresh fruit such as raspberries, strawberries, or stone fruit cut into chunks. You could also substitute yogurt for the cream as we did in our Strawberry Honey Yogurt Scones. They also work well with dried fruits, especially dried cranberries, cherries, or raisins, and chopped toasted nuts such as almonds, pecans, walnuts, or hazelnuts.
I made mine with dark chocolate chunks and a decadent sour cherry extract. They were beautiful, and the extract gave them a splendid pink hue that made them seem even more special. The dark chocolate chunks melted wonderfully in the baking process, and they were so buttery and rich that you didn't need to add extra butter to make them moist.

It's winter in my part of the world, so we had our Dark Chocolate Sour Cherry Scone Cookies with china cups of hot Gratitude Blend, a strawberry Earl Grey tea, but in summer they will be brilliant with iced Carefree herbal tea, a luscious blend bright with hints of watermelon, blueberry, and peach. For something a little more tropical, try the Dance Like Nobody's Watching herbal tea flavored with passionfruit and mango.
The nice thing about scone cookies is that they're great either hot out of the oven or cooled to room temperature. You can make them bite-size to pop in your mouth as an afternoon snack, or nice and big for a leisurely tea party with good friends, served fresh and warm with salted butter and a preserve like Mixed Summer Berry Tea Jelly.