My favourite goodies from Afternoon Tea are the fresh strawberries, scones and cream. These scones are not like the hard breakfast kind you might find at Starbucks. They are light, airy, lightly sweet and absolutely wonderful. Sliced strawberries add freshness while the cream adds an indulgent dessert-like quality to the whole experience. When Afternoon Tea is served with just these things, it’s called Strawberry Tea; in our case, Vegan Strawberry Tea.

For this Strawberry Cream Tea experience, I created the recipe below using the non-vegan Empress Scone recipe as a guide and simply swapped out the non-vegan ingredients. Also, I nixed the raisins. For the devonshire cream, I used a recipe from VegNews.

Vegan British Scones

Time to make: 40 minutes (about 10 minutes to prepare, 25 – 30 minutes to bake)

Makes about 14 scones, 2″ in diameter

Ingredients

2 1/4 cups white flour, sifted

6 tablespoons sugar

2 tablespoons baking powder

pinch of salt

1/2 cup hard butter alternative; soft margarine will NOT work (I used one stick of Earth Balance)

2/3 cup soy milk

2 egg replacers (I used 2 eggs worth of Ener-G Egg Replacer)

Optional: zest from 1 lemon

For wash: 1 teaspoon of melted butter alternative 2 tablespoons of warm soymilk



Directions

Preheat oven to 350F. Prepare a baking sheet lined with parchment paper. Chill pastry cutter or 2 knives in the freezer.

Combine the flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt in a large mixing bowl. Let chill in the fridge for 10 mins.

Mix together egg replacers, lemon zest if using and cold soy milk until frothy. Set aside.

Get the dry ingredients out of the fridge and your pastry cutter or 2 knives out of the freezer. Cut the butter into the dry ingredients until the mixture resemble coarse crumbs. The largest pieces should be no larger than a pea.

Add about 1/4 of the cold soy milk mixture into the dry ingredients and mix well. Continue to add the wet ingredients a little at a time, stirring to incorporated. The dough that forms will be a bit on the crumbly side.

Turn the dough onto a well-floured surface. Knead lightly for 1 minute then form into a lump.

Roll out the dough to 1/2 inch thickness. You may have to be quite liberal with flouring both the rolling surface and the rolling pin.

Use cookie/biscuit cutters or a cup to cut out 2″ circles from the dough. Gather any excess dough, form into a ball, roll out, cut out as many scones as you can, and repeat until the dough is used up.

Place the pieces onto your prepared baking sheet about 1/2 inch apart.

Mix the melted butter alternative and soy milk together. Brush this mixture on the tops of the scones.

Bake for 25 – 30 minutes until the tops are lightly golden.

Let cool before serving with your favourite tea, fresh strawberries and vegan Devonshire cream!

These are best fresh. If serving the next day or later, heat them up in the microwave to make them melt in your mouth soft again.