This is my hybridization of two different King Arthur Flour recipes. I make this pretty often as a thing to take to gatherings or just to have for a snack. See also the buttermilk scones. As there, a good way to work with butter is to freeze it and then grate it.

I’ve used a few different cheeses here to various effect, cheddar and swiss both work pretty well. The cumin is courtesy of a friend who was reading a bunch of Pliny the Elder and found him suggesting making breads flavoured with cumin in order to reduce the Roman dependence on imported pepper. Well. There’s still pepper in this recipe so Pliny would not approve but he was wrong about a lot of things. Perhaps most things!

The cheese makes this dough harder to layer and fold than a plain scone so do what you can. I have more or less abandoned circular scones to the realm of shape packing problems and now I just roll out my dough and slice it with a knife. You get a decent number of crisp rectangular scones and also the more dialectical pieces towards the edges.