Beekeeper's Honey Scones
A quick bread with a tender crumb and golden top, split hot and slathered with melting butter and runny honey. Simple, generous, ready in twenty minutes — the very definition of a Kiwi smoko.
A quick bread with a tender crumb and golden top, split hot and slathered with melting butter and runny honey. Simple, generous, ready in twenty minutes — the very definition of a Kiwi smoko.
Before Everest, my brother Rex and I lived off the bees — hundreds of hives around Auckland. It's honey that paid for my first mountains, so I'm still attached to it. Nothing simpler than a batch of scones in the morning: you pull them out of the oven piping hot, split them, put a knob of butter and a good spoonful of our honey. With a tea, that's the perfect smoko — enough to tackle the day without fuss.
- •Flour — two cups (base)
- •Butter — a piece (melt, crumbliness)
- •Milk — as needed (binder)
- •Baking powder — two teaspoons (quick rise)
- •Honey — as much as you like (sweetness and topping)
Beekeeper's Honey Scones
A quick bread with a tender crumb and golden top, split hot and slathered with melting butter and runny honey. Simple, generous, ready in twenty minutes — the very definition of a Kiwi smoko.
Why this dish? Before becoming a mountaineer, Hillary was a professional beekeeper with his brother: the Auckland hives financed his mountains. The honey scone, a pillar of the New Zealand smoko, is the truest tribute to this man whose life literally rested on honey.
Before Everest, my brother Rex and I lived off the bees — hundreds of hives around Auckland. It's honey that paid for my first mountains, so I'm still attached to it. Nothing simpler than a batch of scones in the morning: you pull them out of the oven piping hot, split them, put a knob of butter and a good spoonful of our honey. With a tea, that's the perfect smoko — enough to tackle the day without fuss.
Ingredients (period version)
- Flour — two cups (base)
- Butter — a piece (melt, crumbliness)
- Milk — as needed (binder)
- Baking powder — two teaspoons (quick rise)
- Honey — as much as you like (sweetness and topping)
Ingredients
- Flour — 250 g (structure)
- Baking powder — 2 tsp (rise)
- Cold butter — 50 g (crumbliness)
- Milk — about 150 ml (binder)
- Salt — 1 pinch (balance)
- Honey (ideally manuka) — generously (signature topping)
- Butter for serving — to taste (melt)
Method
- Preheat the oven to 220°C. Mix flour, baking powder, and salt.
- Rub in the cold butter with your fingertips until the texture resembles breadcrumbs.
- Add the milk gradually to form a soft dough without overworking.
- Roll out to 2 cm thick, cut into rounds or squares, place close together on a tray.
- Bake for 10-12 minutes until well risen and golden.
- Serve warm, split, with butter and a generous drizzle of honey.
How it was made : The scone is the archetypal colonial "quick bread": leavened not by fermentation but by baking powder, thus baked in minutes — ideal for farms and busy households. In rural New Zealand, a batch was made nearly every day for morning tea.
The contemporary twist : Fold the honey inside before baking for "molten heart scones", and name the batch "Tuakau batch" after the region of the family hives.
Sources : Edmund Hillary, Nothing Venture, Nothing Win (1975) · Smoko and New Zealand baking traditions
Edmund Hillary · Charactorium