I know oranges are available year round but for some reason the only time I actually want to eat a whole orange is in the early months of year when my two favorite varieties are available: Cara Cara and Blood Oranges. When they show up at my grocery store I start hording them so I’ll be able to eat as many as possible before they disappear again. I haven’t been to the grocery in a few weeks, so when I went on Monday and saw they finally had blood oranges I grabbed a bunch and decided it was a sign that I had to make something delicious out of them. I was so energized by the idea that I found myself in the kitchen at 11pm later that night making these scones. If I had any regrets about staying up too late I forgot them as soon as I took a bite of one the next morning.

As I said last fall, cream scones are the only way to go. All the scones I’ve tried to make without cream were dry and dense and almost inedible. After some searching I think I have finally found the ultimate cream scone recipe. I say ultimate, because they are literally all cream scones. There’s no butter, there’s no eggs, there’s just lots of sweet, sweet whipping cream and these scones are all the better for it. Heck, there’s hardly any sugar in the recipe, if it weren’t for all the cream it could practically be health food. I thought the lack of sugar and butter were going to result in dry scones but these are soft and fluffy and light. I even substituted some whole wheat flour for the white flour but other than the scones being a bit flatter than they were supposed to be the texture wasn’t really affected.

I adapted to recipe to make use of my oranges by mixing in some of the zest and also making some more orange sugar to sprinkle on top. I also mixed in a bag of one of my favorite snacks, dried tart cherries, which compliments the orange flavor perfectly. This recipe is ridiculously easy—the less you handle the dough, the better these are going to be—and has very few ingredients so you could easily adapt it to use your favorite citrus and dried fruit mix-ins. I’m already planning a blueberry-lemon version. You could even replace all the citrus zest with a spice. Apple-cinnamon maybe?

I really wanted to showcase those blood oranges so when I found this blood orange caramel sauce recipe I knew it would be a perfect way to finish these scones. I know it may seem like sugar overload to put a caramel sauce on top of something that is sprinkled with sugar but the scones only have 1/4 cup of sugar in them, so they are just barely sweet by themselves. As long as you drizzle the caramel on lightly it’s not overpowering at all. It’s sweet but the juice from the blood orange adds a wonderful tartness to it. It was hard to drizzle it on the scones and not just eat it by the spoonful! These scones still taste great with only the orange sugar on top so feel free to omit the caramel sauce but it’s a real treat if you want to make the effort for it.

The way I know I finally found the perfect scone recipe is that my boyfriend loves them. This is a big deal because he hates scones. He’ll usually eat anything you put in front of him and doesn’t complain but we’ve actually had discussions about his hatred of scones because of how dry they are. When he grabbed one this afternoon I told him he’d hate it but he ate it quietly and then 10 minutes later went back for another. According to him, these can’t be scones because they’re actually good. I guess that’s the power of whipping cream.

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Ok, it’s confession time. While my eating habits have improved a lot over the past couple of years, I still have a lot of weaknesses for the unhealthy processed food I used to eat all the time. Things like corn dogs and snack cakes and store bought cookies. But the good thing about learning to cook is that you can learn to make all the “bad” stuff you love. Yes, it may still be unhealthy, but at least you know every single ingredient that went into it and you aren’t consuming any weird chemicals or preservatives. I’ve learned to make Oatmeal Cream Pies and Oreos and chewy Granola Bars and while I can’t say I totally gave up the processed versions of those things, more often than not when I really want them I’ll make them at home.

Spaghetti-Os are another one of my weaknesses. I’m calling them Spaghetti-Os because I think that’s how they are best known, but those are actually made by Campbells. The kind I grew up on was from Chef Boyardee and they were called ABCs & 123s or Dinosaurs. Sadly, they stopped making them in the 90s and I had to settle for Spaghetti-Os which are, in my opinion, inferior. I’m mentioning this to illustrate how deep my love for this—admittedly gross-looking—canned soup goes. I figure many people may have liked it as a child as well, but you grew out of it. I never did. It’s thick and warm and comforting and most of all, simple. It’s almost like a tomato-y macaroni and cheese, actually. I was surprised to learn it had cheese in it at all, but it thickens the tomato sauce and gives it more flavor so it makes sense.

In my effort to try to reduce my exposure to BPA I’ve given up a lot of canned foods. I tried to give up my soup but after being tempted by the cans of it on the grocery store shelf one too many times I decided to make my own homemade Spaghetti-Os. It’s taken me several attempts but I finally figured it out! The recipes I tried didn’t taste right but with a few adjustments I came up a satisfying version. It turns out you need to add a little bit of sugar to remove some of the acidity from the tomato sauce. I’m pretty sure that’s the reason the Campbells version has never tasted “right” to me. I’m sure the original Chef Boyardee version had tons of unnecessary sugar—which is probably one of the reasons I liked it so much as a kid—but I found just a few teaspoons is fine.

The recipe calls for canned tomato sauce, which is what I use despite what I said about staying away from canned stuff. There are several reasons for this. For one thing, it’s winter and tomatoes aren’t going to taste very good right now. For another, it’s just easier. If you want to make your own tomato sauce, I solute you. But I’m going to keep buying my Muir Glen organic tomato sauce since I know it tastes good and their cans are BPA free. (Note: this is not a paid anything, I’m just recommending what I like to use!) And one of the reasons I always reached for canned soup in the first place was out of pure laziness, so I didn’t see any point in complicating the recipe. I like that it’s simple and that I already have all the ingredients in my kitchen. I like that it only takes 30 minutes. It’s nice to be able to enjoy this soup again, without the guilt, just like I did when I was a kid.

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