Top 5 scones in Kansas City

Keith Buchanan, the co-owner and operator of the new Teahouse & Coffeepot in Westport, knows a few things about scones. For one thing, the British-born Buchanan insists that the word scone be pronounced correctly. True, the Food Lover’s Companion gives the pronunciation as SKOHN, like stone, but Buchanan and most Brits prefer SKUN — like skunk without the k.

The Scottish quick bread, according to the Food Lover’s Companion, is named for the legendary Stone of Scone (or Stone of Destiny, depending on who you ask) which is believed by some to be the pillow that biblical Jacob slept upon the night he dreamed of the Stairway to Heaven in Genesis 28. The stone was later taken to Egypt, Sicily, Spain and finally Ireland where St. Patrick is said to have blessed it and predicted that the descendants of Irish kings would reign where the stone lay; it was later taken to Scotland to the Abbey of Scone until the English took the prized rock in 1296; England’s Prince Andrew returned the stone to Scotland 700 years later.

Now a coffee shop standard, scones sometimes taste more like stones than scunz, but there’s an art to making them, says John McClain, who bakes the Irish tea scones for his wife Kerry Browne’s famous Browne’s Irish Market & Deli. The secret of a great scone, says McClain, is that the recipe doesn’t call for a lot of ingredients, and what is blended together must be done by hand. “I’ve tried mechanical mixing,” he says,” and it just doesn’t work.”

Jonathan Bender and I have determined the city’s Top Five Scones — read all about them after the jump.