Biscuit Success!

I'm a Pillsbury/Cracker Barrel-kind of-biscuit girl, and before I moved to Africa I don't know that I ever seriously considered making my own. But, they don't sell those convenient little refrigerator tubes here (you know the ones: you have to peel slowly and wait for the inevitable explosion that nearly gives you a heart attack every time) and it will be a long time before I see another Cracker Barrel.

My first (and I think only) attempt at homemade biscuits several months ago turned out in little, not-fluffy things that I would sooner call a crumpet. I've never had a crumpet but I imagine they are something like that first batch of biscuits. We ate them, and while they weren't horrible, they were a far cry from my biscuit goals. I assumed biscuits were too difficult for a non-perfectionist like me to get "just right." I found another recipe online and pinned it to my Pinterest Breads/Breakfast board, a tribute to what I assumed would probably always be a dry, crumbly and not-very-delicious pipe dream.
Well. That was all before today.

My friend and kindred spirit raved a couple weeks ago about a batch of biscuits she'd made that had turned out wonderfully. Words like "fluffy" and "flakey" were used and they were enough to lure me back onto the biscuit bandwagon. I asked her to send me the recipe, and today I finally got up the nerve to make them.

And let me just say, it can be done!

If you've never made biscuits before, this recipe does a good job of stressing what I consider to be the most important factor: don't overdo your dough! Old hat to the seasoned biscuit baker, but valuable information to the novice. I also put my butter in the freezer for a few hours, just to make sure it was good and cold. Whether or not that helped I know not, but I doubt it hurt anything. My friend suggested that butter temp was important so, I froze it.

I followed the recipe in accordance with the instructions for using a food processor. I don't think my food processor is very good, but after I added the buttermilk (I made mine with milk and vinegar, another well-known tip if you're familiar with baking) things started to come together—literally. I think my chunks of butter were too big, so they didn't blend in very well. In the future I'll try to cut those smaller. Oh, and I didn't have a biscuit cutter so I used a coffee mug. They turned out bigger than I would have liked but that's just a matter of preference.

Another trick to biscuits, which I first read on a Paula Deen recipe, is to have them touch in the pan while baking. I think this definitely makes a difference. I didn't have a round pan big enough to bake all the biscuits so I used a 9x13 glass baking dish, which turned out to be a bit too large. Naturally, not all biscuits were able to touch other biscuits on every side, but those that were seemed to rise better.

I'm so pleased with the texture of these! They were just as fluffy as any Cracker Barrel biscuit and tasted fabulous with honey and butter, which is my favorite way to eat them :) (Another favorite is with Cracker Barrel apple butter, but believe it or not, I didn't have any of that on hand) As a side note, I don't think I added the full amount of salt and in the future will measure to make sure I get the whole teaspoon in. I think it could have used more than I eyeballed.

Here's a link to the recipe my friend and I used, and I highly recommend you give it a try! It was fast, easy, and most importantly, successful! I also threw in a picture of one of the biscuits from my batch. It's not beautiful, or anything...but somehow, that didn't seem to matter :)