As far as scones go, the maple oat nut scone at Starbucks is a superstar. It's flakey, yet it has a bit of a chewy texture from the oats and the nuts, plus a not-too-strong maple flavor both in the scone and in the icing on top. At first I thought that we could use real maple syrup for a good clone or even the maple-flavored syrups that are more commonly used on pancakes today (they are actually corn syrup-based and artificially-flavored). But I found that these syrups add too much moisture to the dough, creating something more like cake batter than the type of dough we want for a dense, chewy scone. In this case I found that the caramel-colored imitation maple flavoring stocked near the vanilla extract in your supermarket gives this scone -- and the icing -- the strong maple taste and dark caramel color that perfectly matches the flavor and appearance of the real deal.