8 Baking Secrets You Haven't Heard Before from the Queen of Scones

If you've ever bitten into a scone and thought, “This is nothing like what I make at home,” there's a good chance Danielle Sepsy, founder of The Hungry Gnome Bakery and author of the new cookbook The Scone Queen Bakes, can tell you exactly why.

Sepsy knows what she’s talking about. She developed her first signature chocolate chip scone recipe at age 13. That recipe eventually became the cornerstone of her bakery and, years later, the blueprint for thousands of scones baked daily out of a professional kitchen.

These days, Sepsy describes her baking style as "rustic elegance.” It’s all deeply comforting in the way that only things made with good butter and smart technique can be. She wants her baked goods to feel nostalgic, triggering memories and inspiring people to gather around a table. And she's built a career on the conviction that none of that requires a culinary degree or a kitchen scale. All you need are a few key insights that, once you know them, change everything.

And most of her tips run counter to what you'd expect. Higher oven temperatures. No sifting. Cold everything, always. Sepsy has a knack for the counterintuitive, and she's generous about sharing it. In our conversation, she broke down the eight baking secrets she wishes more people knew.

Sepsy's most crucial piece of advice for scone bakers is deceptively simple: Keep everything cold. Yes, you read that correctly. "The fat needs to be ice cold," she says. "And really, if you can, all your ingredients being cold will only benefit the end result." When butter stays cold in the dough and then hits a hot oven, something magical happens, she says. The little pieces of fat slowly melt and steam inside the scone, which creates a flaky, moist interior and buttery flavor. If you warm it up too soon, the whole effect collapses. "Sometimes I'll make scones in the summer, and once I put the dough together, it's a little bit soft," she says. "At that point, you need to say, all right, instead of rushing this, put that dough in the freezer or fridge and allow the butter to re-solidify a little bit before you move forward."

This tip shocks many home bakers. When your scones are spreading too much and flattening, the instinct might be to lower the oven temperature. But the reverse is true, Sepsy says. "If you are baking something and it's spreading too much and you're not getting enough height and structure, you actually need your oven to be higher initially," she says. Think of it like searing a burger, she adds. The high heat locks in the shape before the fat has a chance to melt out. For scones, Sepsy starts at 375 degrees F on convection (or 400 degrees F without) for the first 12 or so minutes and then lowers the heat to finish baking through. That initial blast does double duty, locking in the shape and activating the leavening agents for a proper rise. "I can't tell you how many times I go to a coffee shop and see scones on the shelf that look like a sad pancake," she says. "It should have height. That's all determined by the temperature of the oven."

Speaking of ovens, if yours has a convection setting, Sepsy says there's no reason not to use it. "Always, always convection," she says. The fan circulates heat around the baked goods, producing a better rise and more even browning. Most people don't know that they should be using it, don’t know how to use it, or aren't sure when using it would be appropriate. For scones and most other baked goods, it's always appropriate.

Sepsy's pantry secret for soft, chewy baked goods is cake flour. "Cake flour is softer and finer and doesn't have as much gluten" compared to an all-purpose flour, she explains. This means your cookies will come out softer and less structured, in the best way. The results have staying power, too. "Five, six, seven days later in a container on your counter, it's still soft and chewy,” she says. “It never gets that stale, brittle texture, because there's not as much gluten present." Sepsy uses the non-self-rising variety so she can control her own leavening process. "My anxiety won't allow me to use the kind with baking powder already added," she says, laughing. "I like to control that myself."

Sometimes baking starts to feel more like cooking. Sepsy is emphatic that tasting your dough or batter is one of the most important steps you can take in any baking process. She began embracing this tactic even more after she scaled up to high-volume production. "If it doesn't taste good or the flavors aren't really popping before it goes in the oven, it's only going to be worse after it comes out," she says. "Before it's baked is your chance to adjust, just like you would add salt to a sauce or a stew," she adds. Salt is particularly underestimated when it comes to baking sweets, she notes. If you don’t have enough salt, your flavors won't truly shine. And if something tastes flat but the salt level seems right, consider upping your vanilla extract or, if the recipe calls for oil, try using half butter to add some depth of flavor.

When it's time to check if your scones are done, Sepsy skips the toothpicks that many bakers insert into their goods. Instead, she suggests picking one up to get a sense of its weight. "If you pick one up and it feels heavy, that probably means there's some raw dough and too much moisture left in the center," she says. "When it's fully baked, that denseness sort of goes away. Some of the moisture is evaporating in the oven, and it should feel really light." She also looks for slight cracking on top and good color, but the weight test is the one that Sepsy relies on even when she's making scones by the thousands.

You don't need expensive equipment to make great scones, but a good pastry cutter is Sepsy's one non-negotiable tool. She's used her OXO pastry cutter since she was a kid first learning the recipe. It all comes down to temperature control. "The heat of your hands are going to increase the temperature of that fat," she explains, "and then you're not going to have as flaky and delicious of an end product." The pastry cutter lets you work the butter into the flour without melting it, which loops right back to Sepsy’s first rule about the importance of temperature.