Outstanding Cranpricot Scones!

It's an exclamatory recipe!

Note: Not really. This recipe was shamelessly stolen from Smitten Kitchen. I did, however, make some slight alterations, but, for the sake of this recipe, I will refer to them as "optimizations" instead.

Now, for the recipe (!):

You'll need:

2 cups of normal, everyday flour

1 tablespoon of baking powder

4 tablespoons of sugar

half a teaspoon of salt

5 tablespoons of butter, cut up into smallish segments

half a cup of dried cranberries, chopped

half a cup of apricots, chopped

1 cup of heavy cream

The directions (!):

Preheat your oven to 425 and put a rack in the middle. If you are able, you may use an autoclave instead, but make sure it is free of any surgical implements first.

Note: Autoclaves generally only heat up to 250 degrees (F), so for this recipe you'll need almost two of them.

Put your flour, baking powder, sugar, and salt in a big bowl and whisk it up.

If you have one of those fancy pastry blenders, get it out. If not, use your hands. Regardless of tool, add your butter to the pile and use your hands/blender/mandibles to blend the mixture until it looks like coarse meal.

Note: If you don't know what coarse meal looks like, check out this image, which shows a 8-course meal, courtesy of cheapinnyc.com.

There will be some larger butter lumps. Ignore them. Throw your fruit into the coarse meal-like substance and stir it up. Then, stir in your heavy cream until the dough forms.

Now, dump all of this out onto the counter and knead it all into one big sticky ball. Use your amazing geometric powers to create eight triangles out of this dough. It should look something like this:

Note: Perhaps you have noticed that I have made six triangles, rather than eight. This is because I like my scones to be a bit larger than usual. Also, for all you know, there could be two additional scones sitting just out of frame. Maybe there are and maybe there aren't.

Slap your scones down on a baking sheet and throw them in the oven. Bake them for 15-ish minutes, then let them cool down a bit before indulging. If you are using the autoclave method, divide the scones between your autoclaves, bake them for 25 to 30 minutes and see what happens.