A breakfast of homemade scones and marmalade

Published on October 7th, 2025

The other day I woke up to find my sister had gotten up early to bake scones for breakfast. She said she laid awake until 2AM the previous night thinking of nothing but eating fresh scones. I was surprised, I didn't think her the type to succumb to sudden obsession.

The scones were delicious. We had them with clotted cream and homemade orange marmalade I'd made a week prior. I'd insisted we wait a week before using any of my marmalade. At the tail end of summer our household received a deluge of fresh oranges, more than we could eat. I myself enjoy tangerines but despise oranges, I get terrible anxious visions of citric acid smearing against my teeth, so I was eager to reduce the number of oranges in the house.

I used a recipe that advocates boiling the sliced orange rind three times to remove the bitterness. I turned at least 12 or 15 oranges into 6 small jars of marmalade. I recalled a youtube video I'd watched of an old Italian woman making passata the traditional way, at the end she took the sealed jars of tomato sauce and boiled them for 15mins, let them cool in the water overnight, and watched the jars for a week.

"They may explode." She said in Italian. No one seemed to think much of this.

I used the same method to can my marmalade, and thus my insistence of waiting a week. But the jars passed the explosion test, and we unsealed one. I'd never made marmalade before, so I was anxious to know if it had turned out well. It did. Not so much sweet, but effusively vibrant in its orange flavour. I favoured this. I can't stand the overly sweet preserves you get at the supermarket, I find it unedible.

We had the scones and spreads with tea. More to follow.

Love, Makona