Best Ever Biscuits

 I love baking bread. I don't care how many times I bake a loaf of bread, it always delights me to see how the dough has risen. I love kneading the dough, too. There's something soothing about the motion of kneading dough. The rhythmic motion allows me to just zone out and not really think about anything - or meditate on something that's been on my mind. As much as I love baking bread, I just don't do it very often. Right now, in South Carolina, it is just too humid to get the bread dough to do what is needed. That's why I was happy to find this recipe for yeast-less biscuits. It only called for three ingredients - self-rising flour, butter, and milk. Easy enough! The blurb written in the beginning of this recipe said that this was an excellent recipe for introducing kids to biscuit-making. Great! The last time I made biscuits, they resembled hardtack - the biscuits old-time sailors would eat - both in look and consistency. It was not pleasant. At least the birds and squirrels enjoyed their treats.

Since I didn't have any self-rising flour on hand, I did a quick search which gave me a simple recipe to make it using all-purpose flour, baking powder, and salt. I took the now self-rising flour and cold butter (cubed) and used my pastry blender to mix it together. It took a bit of work initially. I really had to put my muscle into it! After about 5 minutes of working the butter into the flour, it finally came together. I added the required milk, and with some help it went from ingredients to dough.

Next, my favorite part! Kneading. The recipe said to knead it 12 times. I was just getting into a good rhythm when it was time to stop. I used both hands, but I'm not set up to take hands-free pictures - so this is a picture of just one hand working the dough. It's not a clean process, but that's part of the fun. You just lean into the mess - embracing it for its beautifully ugly process. It's kind of a metaphor for life. 

There are many times that things get really messy. If you avoid getting messy, you're not going to be able to go from a simple mix of ingredients to the beautiful dough you should be. Once you've accepted that you're going to get messy, you can either accept it, or complain and fuss the whole time. Embrace the mess!

After kneading, and rolling out the dough, it was time to cut the biscuits out. A good cutter makes a world of difference. Don't think you can get away with using a cookie cutter (do they even make round cookie cutters?). Without that sharp edge of the biscuit cutter, you won't get the crisp, clean sides needed to help the dough rise into beautiful soft biscuits. The lumpy ones were "test" biscuits for the honey-cinnamon whipped butter I was making - no sense wasting the scraps of dough!

The recipe called for putting them into the oven as-is, which I did for the first 10 minutes. I checked them and they weren't quite ready. So back in for another 2 minutes. Another check and they still weren't fully cooked. My other half had the genius idea to melt some butter and brush it on the tops of the biscuits. It was just the final touch they needed. After another couple of minutes, they were ready to cool.

These look a lot like those flaky, layered biscuits you get in a tube. They even split just right. I didn't use a knife on any of these, and look how the one on top in the middle is ready to be split open and slathered with delicious, creamy honey-cinnamon butter. These did turn out a little dry and a bit on the bland side, but they soaked up the melting butter readily. Even if I won't repeat this particular recipe, it definitely did give me the confidence to keep trying more biscuit recipes.