Shuttleworth - interesting place - there’s the Shuttleworth Collection of old planes, the Swiss Garden, a Bird of Prey Centre and some kind of play area - all a bit random, all in the grounds of a big house that isn’t open like a stately home, but I think you can hire it for weddings.

The tearoom/restaurant is in the main visitor entrance building semi-detached to the gift shop and serves all the various attractions. This means it’s also accessible to people not visiting the attractions, but does also mean it features uninspiring views over a gravel carpark.

Tea in a pot, with a jug of milk, which you fill youself, so you get plenty, china cup and saucer - I got two cups of tasty tea.

The scone was oddly flat, as you can see from the pic and had a slightly catering look to it, but it was much tastier than it looked, with a fresh moist texture and plenty of fruit. The prepackaged clotted cream was more than generous and yummy. Jam was in a carton, too, but I was offered a choice of blackcurrant or strawberry. Strawberry, of course, is the only sensible choice. It was Robinsons - a good old reliable. Nothing special, but did the job.

Not a bad tea, of a supermarket restaurant kind of standard, not really something you’d make a special trip for.

£3.85 - definitely on the high side for what you got.

Not exactly a cream tea, but highly relevant. We attended upon the Town Mill Bakery at Lyme Regis for the elevenses. This is something of a local institution: as well has purveying a splendid selection of bread-based product, they also provide an amazing eating experience based on long trestle tables, large mugs of beverages and a variety of comestibles to suit the hour of the day. Being eleven-ish, toast, muffins etc were on offer, and also the amazing gigantic Jurassic Scone. This came in two types, the plain and fruit, and both were huge. In fact a couple of these kept the writer in calories until 7:00 in the evening without fretting. The scones are available on a help-yourself basis and you position same on a small rectangular plank (a veritable square meal). The trestle tables were supplied with large dishes of butter and apricot jam. Pots are for wimps. The scones were excellent in texture in taste, coming fresh from the oven. The size was slightly intimidating, and this would not be the way forward for purveyors of cream teas for sound economic reasons. The apricot jam is not quite in accordance with Small Pleasures Guidelines, but for the elevenses experience worked remarkably well.

For this excellent interesting gastro-experience, the scones were £1 each take-away, £2 eat-in, but with access to unlimited butter and jam.

This time I went for the official cream tea on offer, so got two scones rather than the one I normally go for. So the price is a bit more.

The tea was all in order, cup and saucer, tea in a pot and milk in a jug. Nicely provided with an extra pot of hot water for topping up purposes. Top touch. Ooo, it was lovely, a nice cup of tea.

The scones themselves, were damn fine, lovely home-made texture with a hint of crunch to the outside and a lovely moist centre, not too fluffy, not too doughy. Nice cream, but the portion a little stingy for two scones.

The jam however, was a disaster. It all looked good - in a mini-glass jar - not homemade, but the glass jar stuff is usually ok. It was supposed to be strawberry, but the only way you’d know was by reading the label. On opening the jar, I could pour liquid out onto the scone, then the ‘jam’ inside was a weird translucent flabby jelly that had never seen a strawberry. The flavour was citric. Nasty stuff.

Please note scone-servers of Baddesley Clinton - get a better jam supplier to do your scones some justice!

£4.35 - but that’s for two (count ‘em!) scones.

Two things struck me when I opened up my pack of scones
1/ They are triangular - I think I have previously made my feelings about unusual scone shapes quite clear.
2/ Boy are they yellow! Maybe it’s the double butter, or maybe it’s the use of eggs in the mix but something makes these babies glow! I’ve got nothing against a yellow scone, it was just a little unusual.

The packaging bills them as “handcrafted scones made with double butter and succulent sultanas”. The word succulent on a scone package usually raises my eyebrow, scone manufacturers love that alliteration but it’s rarely true. However, Genesis, I think, can genuinely claim that word as their own. These are indeed big juicy sultanas, although I’d have liked a few more of ‘em.

These scones hit the texture pretty much right on the nail. Soft, but not fluffy or doughy - but with a decent amount of body. These scones are a proper tasty, satisfying munch, with a lovely sconey taste - I scarfed a couple from the box without any jam and butter just on their own, and they are moist and tasty enough to stand that kind of treatment.

£1.39 for 4 - a splendid scone, but they ain’t cheap!

Waitrose don’t make any grandiose claims about these little babies. Mearly stating that they are, “Delicious served with jam and cream”. And I can’t argue with that really. These are your basic pre-packaged off the shelf Waitrose own-brand jobs. In a pack of 6, they are a little on the small side, but lashings of fruit and a nice moist texture mean they get the thumbs up from me. Nice price too.

79p for 6. Excellent.

This scone comes from the cream cake fridge in the bakery area of Sainsbury’s in a box of two. Prefilled with cream and jam.

It’s really stretching the definition of scone. No fruit and the scone itself is very heavy on the icing sugar - I don’t mean the bit sprinkled on top - but they have obviously sugared this mightily with the stuff. Consequently you get none of the contrast between sweet jam and hearty scone - you just get acres of goopy sweetness. The jam itself is thin rubbish stuff. No fruit in the jam, no fruit in the scone.

£1.09 for two - pretty crappy.

These scones come in a four pack from the in-store bakery section of Morrisons, so don’t confuse them with the various scones you can doubtlessly buy from the cake and bread aisle.

These were on the big side and filled with plenty of nice big juicy sultanas. (Tesco may want to take note on what a ’succulent’ sultana is really like) Texture not bad at all, definitely fresh and light, but a little too spongy to score absolute top marks with me.

I enjoyed these scones very much and highly recommend them for home scoffing.

69p for a pack of four. I’m happy with that.

Let me be clear before we start. Tesco is evil and I rarely shop there if I can avoid it, but I was at work and the only shop within striking distance of White City on a Sunday is the scary miniature Tesco. And those miniature shops only sell the most expensive supermarket brands, hence I paid the princely sum of £1.47 for a pack of 4 scones.

I served these with butter and home-made strawberry jam (which was, of course, excellent). All done properly on good china - none of which I can fault of course, because I did it.

Down to business, the scone. For some reason these scones are square instead of round. That is just perverse. Presumably Tesco think that by altering the shape of the scone it somehow looks more authentic and homemade. Pah! No idiot would make square scones at home. Scones should be round.

Tesco claim that, “Succulent sultanas fill these melt-in-the-mouth crumbly scones, rich in butter churned from Cornish cream and lightly baked to perfection.”

I claim that these scones are averagely-sized, overly heavy and on the dry side. The sultanas, are just sultanas really, they are not the big juicy sultanas the word succulent would lead you to expect. As far as ‘rich in butter…’ goes. You wouldn’t know. Tastewise, these are just the same as any supermarket scone filled with hydrogenated engine oil. There’s no melting in the mouth here. These scones require a sturdy chew.

They do the job, but are definitely nothing to write home about. If these are what Tesco consider to be ‘Finest’ I venture into their regular scones with some trepidation.

£1.47 for a pack of 4. Overpriced rubbish.

However, to keep some scone action going in the meanwhile, I have decided to start a campaign of eating cream teas in the privacy of my home. There’s no point reviewing the quality of cups of tea that I make, because of course I make a good cup of tea. But I can let you know what I think of the various ready-made scones available in the supermarkets and bakeries of our good nation.

So hold yourself in readiness, and the scone joys will recontinue very soon…

Scone was fruited, decent texture, served with a mini pot of jam and a couple of pats of anchor butter. Which all sounds fine, but it was lacking in flavour somehow.

Tea - well that’s another thing altogether. Only nasty paper cups available, no real milk, only the unpleasant miniature cartons of ‘milk with non-milk fat’ which apparently ‘tastes like real milk’. Pah! And how much do they charge for just one cup of this sacreligious brew? £1.60. Bloody Nora.

£3.90 - far too much for what you get.