Count Your Blessings #113 – Scones straight from the oven

Last night, after tea (dinner if you are posh) Emily decided that she wanted to try out some baking.

As part of her Food Technology (Domestic Sciences for you older ones) she is going to be baking scones next Monday, but her teacher had suggested that they might like to try the recipe out before they had to do it in the class. So last night she got out out the flour, the sugar, the butter and the milk along with a few raisins and baked.

After a short wait she came through to the lounge with a tray loaded with jam, lemon curd, honey, butter and scones straight from the oven. Scones really do need to be fresh to be at their best, and what could be fresher than scones that are still hot.

It was wonderful to be able to open them up and watch the butter melt into them.

The whole batch only lasted a few minutes.

Later on I was thinking about the humble ingredients that make such a wonderful treat. Flour, butter, sugar, milk – all everyday ingredients, nothing too fancy, nothing startlingly brilliant or exotic. Normal, straightforward, honest ingredients. But, bring them together in the right mix, add some heat and you have a delightful treat. There’s no star player in that list, no all out sure-fire winner, just humble commonplace parts.

I work a lot in different teams both at my employer and at church. The teams that are the best are the ones where the right mix of ordinary, honest people are brought together in the right way. It’s amazing what those teams can produce without a star performer but with ordinary normal people.

Actually, if I’m honest, I hate teams where people think that they are the stars, they really get my back up. I’ve been involved in a few situations in the last few years where the people thought that they were wonderful, awesome, fabulous and all I wanted to do was to bring them down a peg or two. In one situation it got to the point where I could barely stand to be in the room with someone. Emily made two types of scone, some with raisins and some without. It was like these people were saying that they were the raisins and that the rest of the scone wasn’t important. I can tell you this, the plain scones were just as nice as the ones with raisins. It was the warmth and freshness that made them special, not the star ingredient, and the same is true for teams.

I hope Emily decided to bake again soon, have I told you, the scones were lovely.