
No sooner than I mumbled that I wouldn't really be able to find blackberries in Tokyo the other day (because I would have liked to add some blackberries to the roasted fruit galette), my mom sent me a huge care package loaded with fresh summer fruits and vegetables, alongside a basket of what seemed like blackberries.

Or so we thought - they might well have been mulberries, though. They were really tart, so much so I ate only a few right out of the basket and turned the remaining majority to some desserts, including cobbler and mousse, but what I liked the best was a simple way of serving berries - with scones.
This was a great excuse for me to try the ginger scone recipe from Nancy Silverton's Pastries from the La Brea Bakery (Villard, 2000) for the second time; I had tried it once a couple of months back and was really happy with my scones that had turned pretty much as good as La Brea Bakery's.

The recipe does not use ground ginger but a bunch of crystallized ginger along with lemon zest, together which I think make really tangy and refreshing scones. This time, I used grated zest of a lime instead of lemon because I wanted to match the scones to the accompanying berries, which I combined with sugar and lime juice to make scone sauce.
The scones, served with clotted cream and the berries, were delish, and I thought it was a really nice change from an ordinary cream-tea staple of fruit scones, clotted cream, and strawberry jam - I even thought that I'd like my scones better with fresh berries like these than with sugar-laden preserves.

I got this idea of serving blackberries with scones from my friend/fellow blogger Naoko, who said she'd tried the recipe from a recent issue of Good Food Magazine. The original recipe apparently didn't tell you to add lime juice to the berries, but I liked how the citrus added another dimension of tartness to the berries, although I couldn't really tell a taste of lime in the scones.
And the berries: they may not have been blackberries that I had wanted to have, but I sure did enjoy the fruits fresh from the backyard of my mom's, and appreciated her for the care she had sent to me.