Easy Cranberry Orange Scones

My favorite cranberry orange scones are light and flaky, with fresh orange zest and dried cranberries. Top with a bit of sugar, or add my optional easy orange glaze.

My Mom makes a lot of scones. She inherited her love from her Mom, and I can only imagine it goes back from there. Now, here I am sharing this cranberry orange scone recipe with you!

Scones are super simple to make. If you’ve made homemade biscuits, you’ll recognize many of the steps in our recipe below. For more scones recipes, see our blackberry lemon scones or these pumpkin scones.

Key Ingredients

• Cranberries: I use dried cranberries in my photos, but you can absolutely use fresh or frozen cranberries in these scones. If you opt for fresh cranberries, keep in mind that they are more tart, so you might want to add a touch more sugar to the dough (I’ve shared tips below the recipe).
• Orange: I use plenty of orange zest to infuse the dough with a bright citrus flavor. For more orange flavor, try my optional orange glaze, which you’ll find in the recipe below.
• Flour: I stick to all-purpose flour for my scones. It consistently yields light and flaky results.
• Baking powder: This adds a little extra lift and lightness to the scones. I also use baking powder when making this strawberry shortcake!
• Butter: I always use very cold butter when making these cranberry scones. The cold butter creates steam in the oven, resulting in that delightful flaky texture we all love.
• Heavy cream: I’m partial to cream scones because they tend to be lighter and more tender than those made solely with butter.
• Honey: I love the subtle sweetness honey adds to these cranberry orange scones. For an extra special touch, try using orange blossom honey! Feel free to substitute with sugar.

How to Make Cranberry Orange Scones

Using cold ingredients is really important when making scones. The butter should be chilled and hard, and you want to use the cream straight from the refrigerator.

Once your dry ingredients are combined, it’s time to “cut in” the cold butter. I use a pastry blender for this, but you can also use cool hands or a food processor. The goal is to distribute small pieces of butter throughout the flour. During baking, these little bits of butter create steam pockets that make the scones rise, resulting in a light and tender texture (the same things happens in my butter pie crust recipe and these biscuits).

You’ll have a crumbly mixture after cutting in the butter and adding the cream. Gently bring it together into a ball on a lightly floured surface, kneading only 3 to 5 times.

Pat the dough into a disk and cut it into eight triangles. Don’t worry if the edges are ragged. They’ll puff up beautifully in the oven.