B's Biscuits

I woke up on Saturday morning at 5:30 and my first thought was "what can I bake?!?" I delved into our wedding gift recipes and gravitated straight to B's Biscuits, a recipe perfected by one of our many adopted moms, Barbara H. Cory and I stayed with her on one of our trips to San Francisco and awoke each morning to these warm biscuits, slathered with butter (Barbara reminds us not to be chintzy with the butter!) and homemade jam. Talk about a great house in which to be a guest!

This Saturday was my first opportunity to see if I could pull off the biscuits, and in the process I proved that they are foolproof. Despite my years of baking experience, I managed to mix in the wet ingredients wrong, lose count of how much baking powder I added, and throw some baking soda into the homemade jam. And yet, they turned out delicious!


Ingredients:
2 cups all purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 stick cold unsalted butter, cut into little cubes
3/4 cups well-shaken buttermilk or kefir (I used Kefir)

Preheat oven to 425. Lightly grease a baking sheet.

Mix dry ingredients in a cuisinart. Blend in butter cubes but keep the little lumps. (I would show you what this looked like but this is the first thing I screwed up...oops!). Add buttermilk or kefir and mix until dough ball forms.


On a lightly floured surface, roll or pat out dough to about a 1/2 inch thickness. Cut out as many rounds as possible with a floured cutter (I used a juice glass, which worked just fine). Don't twist when cutting as this could prevent the biscuits from rising properly. Gather scraps and cut as many more as you can.

Space the rounds about 1 1/2 inches apart on the cookie sheet and brush the tops with buttermilk or kefir (I used half and half). Bake until pale gold (about 12-15 minutes). Let cool on a wire rack and serve warm or room temperature.


Despite my errors along the way, the biscuits rose nicely and tasted divine. While the biscuits baked, I took some frozen strawberries, threw them in a saucepan with some sugar and simmered them until they were hot and melty. Then I tossed in some corn starch and cooked a few minutes longer. Because we don't like big strawberry chunks in our jam, I put them through a few pulses in the blender and served the warm jam alongside the biscuits with copious (though not really necessary, but you don't want to be chintzy!) amounts of butter.

Turns out my husband is perfectly happy to be woken up at 8am on a Saturday morning if it involves fresh biscuits and homemade jam!