Scones become diner rolls ... Is this some kind of kitchen magic alchemy or just an experiment gone wrong

Okay, in a fit of inspiration, or insanity you be the judge, I decided to try to create a lower fat, lower calorie, better for me scone. I like to think I entered the kitchen for this experiment boldly if not with a lot of confidence.

Okay, so the basis of my experiment is the scone recipe below:

2 cups flour
2 tbls sugar
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 cup butter
3/4 cup milk
1 egg

My plan was to substitute splenda for the sugar, unsweetened applesauce for the butter, buttermilk for milk, and add cornstarch to help control the gluten.

I felt pretty good as I started to mix the dry ingredients. I mean that was easy. I just followed the recipe and decided to start with 1 tbls of cornstarch to start. It seemed, from my little bit of experience, to be a good, safe amount.

Next was the applesauce. I had no idea how much applesauce to use in place of butter. I read the one article on TLC about low fat baking and the upshot was there is no magic formula. You just have to experiment. So, I decided to add 1 tbls of appleasauce at a time until I got the desired consistency of small crumbs. 10 tbls, or 1 cup+2 tbls of appleasauce, later I got the consistency I thought I was looking for. Plus, it smelled alright, and when I took a small bite of the nascent dough, it tasted alright.

Next came the wet ingredients -- or where things started to go wrong. I mixed 1 whole egg, with 3/4 cup buttermilk. That's right, I decided to do a 1:1 substitution for the buttermilk. I figured that I wanted to keep the moisture content the same between the recipes, I certainly wouldn't want more buttermilk than milk, and it just seemed like a good place to start. So, I mixed the egg and the milk together and mixed into the "dry" ingredients.

The ingredients mixed very well together. Only what was in the bowl wasn't a dough. It was batter. I had created a lower calorie, lower fat, better for me recipe for some kind of batter. Which would be fine, but not my goal. My goal was to have a dough for a quick bread that would bake into a scone. So, at this point I had two choices. I could try and fix this or I could cut my losses now and create some kind of muffin? cake? cookie? This was an easy choice. I wanted scones with my tea and darn it I was going to do my best to get them.

So, instead of looking at the batter in the bowl as batter, I looked at it as too moist dough. As far as I know there was only one thing to do: add more flour and corn starch. A lot more four and corn starch. 2 tbls at a time I added flour to the batter. After adding 4 tbls I stopped with the that and added 2 tbls of cornstarch. The result? Well it was less batter-ish and more dough-ish, but still nothing I could turn onto the counter and knead. I went back to the flour. After adding a full cup of flour I had a less wet doug, not quite dry, glutinous stuff and I thought maybe I can knead this. This is where things went terribly wrong

I laid a piece of parchment paper covered with a little flour on my counter. I turned my sorta dough out onto it. I placed my freshly washed hands onto my "dough" to kneed and quickly realized that wasn't going to happen. Yes the batter/dough was more firm and stickng together wonderfully, there was no kneading this.

My heart sank. Honestly in that moment I thought I had a complete mess on my hands, literally. It was all stuck to my hands. And again I was faced with a few choices. I could try adding more flour, but i was pretty sure that would mean needing more of other things, too. And I didn;'t even know how to begin to approach that problem. Or I could throw the whole thing away. That seemed like a waste. Option three bake it. Stick it in the oven and see what happens. I chose three.

When I was kid i used to make drop biscuits. I thought maybe these could be drop scones. I grabbed two spoons and started plopping -- my batter? my dough? -- whatever you want to call it onto parchment lined pans. I placed them in a pre-heated 375 degree oven and to see what would come out.

15 minutes later I opened the oven and found round, browned, bread like things. I put my creation on cooling racks and they smelled okay, but it wasn't scones. Scones should be a little crumbly, tender. Whatever I pulled out of the oven were none of those things. In fact, it reminded me of a deflated dinner roll.