Flaky and cozy scones, filled with bright cranberries and laminated with sticky fig jam. Served warm with butter, they are the perfect fall breakfast treat.

This recipe is sponsored by Crisco® as a part of their Holiday Baking 2023 Campaign. All thoughts and opinions are my own. Thank you for supporting the businesses who support Gathered At My Table!

When I first got into baking, I bought a giant copy of Thomas Keller’s Bouchon Bakery Cookbook. I’d been baking at home all throughout college, bookmarking my favorite food blogs and keeping a running sticky-note list of all of the recipes I wanted to try. And then I got serious. I bought this gargantuan cookbook and decided I was going to teach myself how to laminate dough and temper chocolate at home. I was optimistic to say the least.

The first recipe I made from the book was Cinnamon Honey Scones—plain scones with a homemade cinnamon honey butter streaked throughout in a tie-dye fashion. I made them once and instantly felt like a professional baker. So I made them again. And again. I don’t actually remember making many more recipes from that book that year because I just made scones. As I started to feel confident in my baking ability, I began to experiment. Cinnamon honey scones turned into bacon cheddar scones, which turned into feta and green onion scones. Was this the recipe that changed my entire career trajectory? Possibly.

I still use Thomas Keller’s scone recipe as a base today, though I’ve tweaked it many times over the years to suit my mood or my flavors. This year, it’s taking a fall spin with these Fig and Cranberry Scones, perfect for all of your holiday brunches and gatherings this season.

how to make fig and cranberry scones

The key to a good scone is cold fat and lots of it. In this recipe, we are using four different types of fat, each with a different role, to help ensure maximum tenderness. We’re using a little bit of cold, grated butter for flavor, but the real work horse in this recipe is Crisco® All Vegetable Shortening. Shortening, like butter, is a solid fat, but unlike butter, it is made up of 100% fat. This is good in many baking applications because there is no water content, it helps provide flakiness without the spread. Shortening is super versatile, plant-based and its high melting point helps create flaky layers. We are also using heavy cream and sour cream, to provide moisture and tenderness.

The best part of this recipe are the mix-ins. We fold dried cranberries into the dough and then laminate fig butter into each flaky layer, threading layers of flavor throughout the scones.

the importance of chilling and freezing

For a baked good that hinges on the solidity of fat for it’s rise and tenderness, chilling and freezing are important. Like biscuits and pie dough, the colder the better. We chill the scone dough before cutting to allow the fats to re-harden and allow the flour to properly absorb the moisture. Then, after slicing the scones into triangles, they are frozen completely and baking off from frozen. This will prevent spreading and flat, underwhelming scones.