Scones, never made this many before

A short while ago my wife talked to me about a quandry she faces for a local PTA event fundraiser for our childrens school, she had agreed to produce one thing for this event, my reply was " you only agreed to do ONE thing, wow you held yourself back this time why only one?"

"err because it is 500 scones!"

"how many?"

and so it goes on, anyway there is no way we could possibly conceive preparing and cooking 500 scones in our small home kitchen so the only solution was for me to do them at work. so with the fun day this Sunday, I thought I would get cracking on the mix first, lets get the ingredients together.

18 kg flour

2.4kg sugar

600gm baking powder

120 (1.5kg) eggs

2.5 kg sultanas (only used in half the batch)

4.8kg butter

80g salt

2.2 litres of milk

split into 4 batches

which gives you.......

note the phone in the foreground to give an idea of scale

after a little resting (me and the dough)

roll, cut, brush with egg wash, allow to dry and brush again, its amazing I noted when re-rolling after first cut, exactly how aggressive the gluten develops on every successive roll after the first, anyway digressing from the point

then cook like so......

with so many in the oven the reciped time of 15 mins at 170C is thrown out of the window, they took between 21 and 28 minutes due to the air struggling to circulate around the oven.

once done.....

in total 2 oven loads were required to achive the number my wife needed, and after cooling I was left with 554 scones, there was a noticable difference between 1st roll and the subsequent rolls to use up all the mix, if you can afford to when making the mix then only use the first roll, and use the remaining dough on fruit cobblers and the like.

anyway, back to work got a wedding to prepare now.