Hungry Wives Chocolate Chip Scones

Every tuesday, [and at one season used to be thursdays], i have been meeting faithfully with a small group of women for the past 7+ years.  We call ourselves the Hungry Wives as kind of a playful joke, as we meet & gather in hopes to encourage and strengthen each other in our roles as wives. We lay a list of our burdens and fears on the table, chatting over french press and peeled boiled eggs straight from Jeanne's free range hearty chickens. We have walked through all sorts of wifely messes, affairs, broken purity, emotional abuse, respect/boundaries, emotional affairs, gossip/slander, boredom, dry physical intimacy spells, you name it..we are there for each other through it all, and every week, we feel like it's a new mercy to begin once again in the gift of our marriages to start over, renewed and encouraged. we aren't meant to walk alone, a wise wife i respect always says. we bring that to our meetings and we pray, cry, wipe each other's kids faces and our lives are intersected at that table and it is a gift.  We are hungry for genuine, thriving marriages, we are for each other, and the accountability is so essential to moving our marriages forward in the right direction. 

With that deeper purpose at the center, we also love to eat, laugh, and have a little coffee with our heavy creamer, and Jeanne, one of the 4 of us, without fail, makes us fresh chocolate chip scones. it is a highlight for sure, as they are usually just coming out of the oven as we arrive each morning. they are soft and the perfect amount if gooey inside, riddled with mini chocolate chips, and the delicate crisp outsides with a tinge of brown, heaven! She has since taught me to make them and i wanted to share them here. they are so simple to make, they are free of gluten and unrefined sugar. the only sweetness comes from a humble tablespoon of honey and the mini chocolate chips. i just love them and i hope you love them too!! 

you will need:
2 cups of blanched almond flour 
3/4 tsp baking soda [i have subbed baking powder which is ok in a bind, but the taste is a bit different]
1/4 tsp fine sea salt [i use Trader Joe's]
1/3 cup mini semi sweet chocolate chips [although i like to throw in a little more for good measure]

for wet ingredients:
1 large egg [jeanne can do this bc she has fresh organic eggs, i use 2 small eggs]
1/2 tsp vanilla extract [again, mine came from TJ's]
1 tbs honey

preheat oven to 350 degrees.

in large bowl, mix the dry ingredients, using fingers to mix well. 

in a smaller bowl, mix wet ingredients with a fork, just to stir things up a bit. you want it all mixed a bit. 

pour wet ingredients into the dry mix and stir gently with a spoon, finish with your hands to form a wet dough. 

place dough on parchment paper and form into a circle, about 1 inch thick. cut into pie pieces and separate gently on paper. this gives you nice toasty edges. 

place paper on baking sheet and pop in oven for about 11 minutes-that seems to be the magic number for me.. [10-12]

remove from oven and let cool a bit. enjoy with your girlfriends and encourage one another on how to be a hungry wife. ;)