A culinary misadventure awaits…
The Axis of Awesome were an Australian comedy music act formed in 2006 in Sydney, Australia, comprised of lead vocalist Jordan Raskopoulous, guitarist and vocalist Lee Naimo, and keyboardist and vocalist Benny Davis.
The group released seven albums, and toured worldwide several times over twelve years, before going their separate ways in 2018. They are perhaps most famous for their ‘Four Chords‘ song, a medeley of dozens of pop songs that use the I-V-vi-IV chord progression, which went viral on YouTube in 2009.
I first discovered The Axis of Awesome as a child, where I watched them perform a pair of songs at the Adelaide Fringe festival, as part of a free ‘Best of Fringe’ teaser show on one of the outdoor stages. For this performance they performed ‘Birdplane‘ a parody of Five for Fighting’s ‘Superman’ and, relevant to our misadventures today, ‘How To No. 1‘ a parody of The Fray’s ‘How To Save A Life’ that detailed the steps for baking a scone.
Restructuring a recipe into the lyrics of another song and still having something resembling a cohesive recipe is an achievement to be sure, but analysing the recipe more clearly it’s not hard to notice that it doesn’t seem to resemble a recipe for scones. So the question remains, What do you get if you follow the recipe? Does it even resemble a scone? I decided to find out.
Step 1: Preheat the oven ’til it’s hot.
Already, we’re lacking specifics. I’m going to assume 160°C on a fan-forced oven.
Then take a mixing bowl, or pot. A spatula, or wooden spoon. Settle down we’ll be baking soon.
Check!
A cup of milk, a cup of flour.
The type of flour isn’t specified, so I’m going to assume self-rasing here. We’ve also got no butter, used to give scones their doughy, crumbly texture. It’ll be interesting to see what mix consistency we actually have here.
Mix in an egg.
Okaaay, the consistency here is all wrong. This is a liquid and certainly not a dough, it’s far closer to cake or pancake batter.
Wait for an hour.
This is completely superflous… what?
We’d only need to do this for bread dough to allow it to rise. This recipe has no yeast, why are we doing this? Also, we’ve preheated our oven all the way to temperature, only to not need it for the next hour… off it goes I guess?
Take sultanas to fill the hole.
No quantities here again! I’ve added what seems like an okay amount.
I just can’t wait to lick the bowl.
Why??? this is such a basic mix that I can’t imagine the batter itself tastes great at this point. Also salmonella… there’s raw egg in here!
Take the bowl and pour the mixture in. Make sure that you’ve pre-greased the tin.
More oddities! Normally we’d be baking scones on a tray but given the consistency of this mixture, a tin is going to be the only way to do this. So at least those two line up.
With regards to tin size though, it’s a little weird. This isn’t really enough mixture for a large cake tin, and even if it was, that’s not really a scone. I’ve used some mini loaf tins here. as it’s what made the most sense.
You’ll see it’s easy, it won’t take long.
Is not specific of exactly how long to bake for, but what did we expect at this point.
Since we’ve got no directions, I’m aiming for golden brown, and for a knife to come out clean.
Now you know how to bake a scone.
Instructions unclear, made 6 "Scones".
The Verdict
I was not wrong about the consistency being that of pancake batter, because that’s almost exactly what this is. Once left to cool, eating one of these tastes like eating a really thick, cold pancake
Because of the liquid consistency of the batter, the sultanas have all settled on the bottom of the loaves, with no hope of being distributed inside them. Nevertheless, it’s a good thing they’re included in the recipe, as they add some much needed sweetness to the result. The loaves would have tasted entirely of plain pancake otherwise.
In short, they’re certainly edible in their current form, but nothing spectacular. For this particular misadventure, it was all about the journey of discovery and much less about the destination. My curiosity is now satiated.
