Properly grown culinary pumpkins will be nice, dense and sweet to taste

Fifteen thousand votes were cast by the public and a short list of 15 places from cafes to hotels and restaurants was announced.

I was delighted to be asked to judge the competition alongside Valerie Rossborough from the Dairy Council and Glynis Henderson, a culinary education expert. We travelled across the country from Londonderry to the Ards peninsula and a myriad of places in between.

It was a difficult task picking a winner as the standard of scones was excellent. In the end the overall prize went to the Cottage Café in the Craft Village in Londonderry.

The building is a quaint thatched one in the middle of the city.

Each contestant had to present us with a selection of three scones.

One of the deciding factors in the Cottage Café’s win was a delicious mushroom scone, with sundried tomatoes that was split and grilled with cheese.

There’s something comforting about a savoury scone and this one is worth making the trip for.

In my first recipe I’ve included a cheese scone recipe to accompany a seasonal pumpkin soup. There are a few pumpkin growers dotted around the province including Fulton’s farm in Donemana, Slemish Market Garden in Ballymena and Broughgammon farm outside Ballycastle.

They grow proper culinary pumpkins that are dense and sweet. Don’t try making soup with supermarket pumpkins as they are grown primarily for their thin skin which makes them easy to carve but they have no taste.

The other recipe this week is for a sweet cherry scone with whipped butter. Rather than use glace fruit as is the norm, the recipe here calls for fresh or frozen cherries.

They’re flavoured with orange zest and the juice is boiled with maple syrup and whipped into butter to accompany the warm scones.

The key to a successful scone is the ingredients – good quality butter, buttermilk and eggs will ensure a top quality result.

All the finalists in the Dairy Council scone competition applied this ethos to their recipes.

The finalists can be found on the Dairy Council of NI’s social media platforms. It took us three full days to visit them all (tough life I know) but you could spread it out a bit or support one near to you. You won’t regret it.