alternative TWD: Toasted Almond Scones

(Last weekend without the actual TWD-recipe. Im am so much looking forward to baking along with the others again! I love scones and biscuits and savory treats. But there comes the day when you really have had enough of it. Next Weekend it's Easter and I am "allowed" to eat sweets again. I thought about doin the Coconut Tea Cake, chosen by Carmen of  Carmen Cooksand I was almost ready to go for it. I even started shredding and toasting the coco. Because I started to feel like betraying. I was so happy when I finally made it to the blogroll, and for the last weeks I did just not participate. We have  a new "tool", the "Leave your link"-list, which is actually a pretty good idea by Clara from I heart food4thought. And I feel bad about not beeing able to leave my weekly link there. But when I made the Scones this morning I realised I will never, never ever be able to not taste what I made and lick off the spoons. No way. So I better stay away from the TWD-selection for this final week, even if it makes be feel bad. But breaking the Lenten promise in the very last week would make me feel even worse.)

This is it. This is the last recipe I found in Dorie's book where leaving out the sugar shouldn't make a big difference. I like almost all kinds of nuts (hazelnuts are not my favourite), so scones with a lot of almond taste are perfect for my last Lenten week.
 I exchanged the cream for lactose free yoghurt and the whole milk for soy-rice-milk, and it was fine. I took a tad less baking powder, and the scones did not spread a lot - maybe they would have otherwise. As usual, baking time was far less for my oven (about 12 mins for the first, and 10 mins for the second batch).

Funnily, I forgot to toast the almond slices. And that's funny, because I did not find out before I was looking up the accurate name of the scones to put it in this blog-entry :o] So, I guess it would have put the almond taste even more forward, but obviously it didn't matter too much.

I will definitely, definitely do them again, even if I look at all the recipes I first have to catch up with. But from all the Scones/Biscuit-recipes I made recently (Basic Biscuits, Sweet Potato Biscuits, Apple Cheddar Scones), this is definitely the one I like most and up to now my favourite scones recipe!

(In the bowl they look flatter as they had been. The bowl, by the way, is a bol, a mega-cup without handle for Café au lait, very common in France - and at my house :o] My friend J. made it. She is an awesome comic drawer. Well, not only comics, but comics are definitely her specialisation!)