I recently had leftover frozen chives and parmesan from the Cook's Illustrated Almost No-Stir Risotto, and after failing to find a parmesan chive biscuit recipe that I was convinced I had somewhere, I turned to the internet to figure out what kind of savory dish I could make with the limited quantities of those ingredients that I had. I found a Parmesan Chive Scone recipe online, and decided to give it a go, with a few modifications. I think some of the modifications — reducing the amount of chives to what I had on hand (about 1/2 of what the original recipe called for), adding a tablespoon of chopped parsley, and substituting 1/4 cup of whole wheat flour for some of the all-purpose flour simply because I ran out of all-purpose — would have been fine on their own, but fatefully, I decided to freeze and grate the butter, a la the Cook's Illustrated Blueberry Scones recipe, to achieve light and buttery scones.
Although this recipe cautioned against working the butter too much and ensuring that the scones just held together without too much mixing, the frozen, grated butter and heavy cream seemed to not bind the dough together enough. I decided to plow forward though with the loose dough thinking that the baking would solve the texture issue, but the resulting scones unfortunately fell apart while handling them. The flavor was fine (perhaps though the whole wheat flour I would omit in the future), but the overly crumbly texture really made these scones unenjoyable to consume. In hindsight, I would perhaps freeze only half of the butter, and maybe add some additional heavy cream to achieve the right texture. Ugh. On to the next one.
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