Lemon Ricotta Poppy Seed Scones

Lemon Ricotta Poppy Seed Scones with Poppy Seed Streusel - Bake from Scratch Bread Collection

Crumble-topped and packed with flavor, these Lemon Ricotta Poppy Seed Scones with Poppy Seed Streusel fill each heavenly bite with a zesty flair.

Lemon Ricotta Poppy Seed Scones with Poppy Seed Streusel
Makes 8
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  1. ½ cup (63 grams) all-purpose flour
  2. ¼ cup (55 grams) firmly packed light brown sugar
  3. 2 tablespoons (24 grams) granulated sugar
  4. 1 lemon, zested
  5. 1 teaspoon (3 grams) poppy seeds
  6. ¼ cup (57 grams) unsalted butter, melted
  1. 2⅔ cups (334 grams) all-purpose flour
  2. ⅓ cup (67 grams) granulated sugar
  3. 2 tablespoons (18 grams) poppy seeds
  4. 1 tablespoon (15 grams) baking powder
  5. ½ teaspoon (1.5 grams) kosher salt
  6. 2 lemons, zested and juiced or about 4 tablespoons (60 grams) of lemon juice and 2 tablespoons lemon zest
  7. ½ cup (113 grams) cold unsalted butter, cubed
  8. 1 cup heavy whipping cream
  9. ½ cup ricotta cheese
  1. For streusel: In a medium bowl, combine flour, sugars, zest, and poppy seeds. Drizzle with melted butter, and stir with a wooden spoon until combined. Crumble with your fingertips until desired consistency is reached.
  3. For scones: In the work bowl of a food processor, place flour, sugar, poppy seeds, baking powder, salt, and zest; pulse until combined. Add cold butter, and pulse until mixture is crumbly.
  4. Transfer dough to a large bowl, and fold in cream, ricotta, and lemon juice, stirring until combined. Turn out dough onto a lightly floured surface, and knead briefly, just until dough comes together. (This is a soft dough.) Press dough into prepared cake pan. Turn out, and using a sharp knife or bench scraper, cut into 8 wedges. Transfer wedges to prepared baking sheet.
  5. Sprinkle liberally with streusel, and bake until golden brown, 12 to 15 minutes.
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  1. hello Made this scone recipe this morning. I did not come out as planned. Your recipe says it is a soft dough so I expected something less firm. This really was soft. It was difficult to cut and have a triangular shape remain for the scone. And, when put in the oven, the scones flattened out on the cookie sheet looking quite tired. I checked the recipe and verified the gram measurements indicated so it was not an issue of operator error. Just wanted to know if other readers had experienced this problem and what adjustments they may have made.

    one last thing, the streusel portion of the recipe indicates melting the butter but that made the streusel more like a paste than a crumple topping.

    I made a couple of other of your scone recipes from your magazine and they came out fine. any hep you can provide would be great. THANKS

    • Hi Robert, we’re so sorry for your troubles with this recipe! Unfortunately, we did find an error in the streusel. The butter is supposed to be melted, but the recipe should call for 1/2 cup (63 grams) all-purpose flour in the streusel ingredient list. When we found the issue, we immediately added it to our Recipe Corrections page, but we are so sorry that you were unable to see the correction before making these. We know how frustrating that must be. As for your problems with the dough, we haven’t experienced this issue before in our test kitchen. Our initial thought would be that you likely got more juice from your lemons than we did, making your dough even softer. We used regular-sized lemons (99 grams whole, unpeeled). Do you think your lemons may have been considered large?

  2. Hello. I’m planning to try these scones, but I will be using Meyer lemons (from my backyard – lucky me). They provide ALOT of juice. Given your note above, I was hoping you might be able to provide a liquid measure of the right amount of juice to use for the scone batter. Thanks!

    • Hey Barbara,

      Thanks for reaching out! We talked with our test kitchen and they gave a general rule of thumb for their lemon juice measurement: The average lemon yields 2 tablespoons juice. So for two lemons that would be 4 tablespoons or 60 grams. (15 grams per tablespoon).

      Since you’re lucky enough to have your own mega lemons, you will want to adjust your measurements accordingly. We hope this has been helpful. Happy baking!

  3. hi, i also made the and they came out less than perfect. I was using the recipe from the magazine, so i didn’t see the 1/2 cup flour in the streusel or the change in the amount of flour in the scone from 2 1/2 to 1 2/3 cups. I would say that the amount of lemon juice needs to be more exact in the recipe.

    Also, so how do you get the streusel to ‘stick’ to the top of scone? they seems to fall off / roll off.
    I have loved your magazine and recipes.


  4. Made these tonight. I mixed everything by hand and the dough turned out quite nicely. They taste good as well. The only thing I’ll do differently next time is use two smaller cake pans instead of one larger one as the scones are massive and didn’t cook all the way through even though the outside is golden and some of the streusel began to burn. Having smaller scones might help with baking evenly.

  5. This recipe is very flawed. The first time when I did it as written, it was a horrific disaster. Extremely wet, they never cooked and were unedible, The taste was disgusting, I threw them out. Trying again, my 2 small lemons gave off 1/4 cup of juice, the dough wasn’t that wet at all but still too soft, and this was AFTER removing the ricotta from the recipe altogether, and omitting the streusel as that part of the recipe is still flawed even after correcting the flour. The streusel also doesn’t stick, which means it just burns on the sheet. Because the dough lacked firmness, they just spread like paste when they baked and didn’t cook through. I never saw any recipe corrections since I bought the very pricey cookbook and used the recipe in that. This is the 3rd recipe from the book that has been wrong, and while I would understand a few errors here and there in a monthly publication, the magazine is bi-monthly, and you have more time to catch mistakes. There’s ZERO excuse for errors in a published cookbook.

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