Name: English Scones and clotted cream
Prep time: 5 min
Cook time: 12 min
Total time: 17 min
Cuisine: British
Ingredients: 500g self-raising flour; 50g caster sugar; Pinch of salt; 100g salted butter (softened); 300ml milk; 1 egg; Whipped Cream; Jam of your choosing; Optional :; 50g dried mixed fruit

We may get commissions for purchases made through links in this post. For more information go to Privacy Policy & Disclosure.

English scones with jam and cream

There is nothing more English than sitting down to a pot of tea with a scone and clotted cream.

Scones are a traditional component of the British cream tea and we serve scones with clotted cream and jam.

This blogpost will give you a traditional English scones recipe at the bottom of the page.

Cornish Clotted Cream

I have been going to Cornwall for most of my life on holiday and there they have an extra special type of cream called English ‘clotted cream’.

‘Clotted’ cream sounds disgusting ( 🙂 ), but nothing could be further from the truth.

Real Cornish clotted cream is just divine, and you really cannot beat some good old British scones with clotted cream. They are made for each other.

How to make clotted cream?

You make clotted cream with a special process that creates a thick cream with a very high fat content. Here is a link showing how you can make your own clotted cream.

Proper clotted cream is delicious and the perfect ingredient for a proper English cream tea.

You find clotted cream mainly in Devon and Cornwall in the ‘West Country’, as it is called.

Rodda’s in Cornwall is the largest commercial producer of this product and really if you get the chance to try it, then please do.

It is the real thing. You will love it!

Here in Ireland, we do not have easy access to clotted cream so (against the advice of Rodda’s of course!) we have used whipped cream in our photographs.

A useful tip – if you just have a single or double cream available and need to turn it into a thick spreadable cream, try using your Nutribullet. It will whip it up in no time!

NutriBullet Pro – High-Speed Blender

[Whipped cream is in fact what you will find in most cream teas across the UK.]

Scone Arguments:

How to pronounce ‘scone’

There are a number of things about scones that cause disruption across the UK. One of these is the pronunciation of the word ‘scone‘.

Does it rhyme with the word ‘gone’ or ‘bone’? I must admit we belong to the ‘gone’ grouping in my house.

Follow the link for more information on this.

Jam or clotted cream first?

Another disagreement, as mentioned in the Rodda page, is whether you put the jam or the cream on first. In Devon they put the cream on first, whereas in Cornwall they do the opposite.

The Queen follows the Cornish example, as do we, so that should settle the matter :)!

cream scones — Jam on the bottom, cream on top

The type of jam you use in your cream tea is really up to you. Quite often strawberry jam is used but really you can use whatever you prefer.

This British scone recipe reminds me of sitting in the café at the beautiful Lamorna Cove eating a cream tea whilst watching the rain pouring down the windows.

It was just one of the things we would do on a rainy day down there. And rainy days, believe me, we had enough every August 🙂

how to make scones — Jam first, clotted cream second

You can choose with this recipe to make plain scones or fruit scones. I have used a mix of dried fruit in some of the scones in these pictures.

I think raisin scones or sultana scones are a bit more interesting than a plain scone.

Using a mix of fruits keeps it a bit of a surprise as to what you will get!

How to make English scones