Biscuits are one of those things that I just can't make. I have tried various recipes over time, and they never turn out how I want them to. They're either too hard, too flat, taste like nothing, or are just plain ugly. That is, until today.
I went to a friend's Christmas party Saturday night and really did my part helping her get rid of her red wine. Ugh. So, Sunday morning when I wanted sausage biscuits from the Barksdale to ease my pain, getting showered and dressed and out into the cold seemed like far too much effort to exert just for some breakfast. The good news: we had half a package of sausage in the freezer. So, time to make biscuits! I checked my favorite southern cookbook, The Lee Brothers Southern Cookbook, and located a recipe for bird eye buttermilk biscuits. Problem #1: no buttermilk. Problem #2: not even any milk! We did have some heavy cream leftover from a recent baking extravaganza, so I squeezed a little lemon juice into the cream and went with it. The recipe was also for little 2-inch biscuits, but I went ahead and used a juice glass to cut mine out. I wanted to make sausage biscuits after all, not hors d'oeuvres. Prepared for failure due to my long history of ruining biscuits and to the fact that I tweaked what was probably a perfectly good recipe out of sheer laziness, I made biscuit dough. I checked them a couple of times while they were baking and began to realize that I had, in fact, made biscuits! They were rising beautifully and turning brown on the tops...breakfast was on the way!
An important thing about biscuits: don't overwork the dough or they will be tough. For this reason, I chose not to make any biscuits from the scraps, but if you need more biscuits, you can always roll out the scraps to make a few more. They'll just be a little tougher than the first round.
Cream biscuits:
makes 6-8 biscuits
2 cups flour
1 T baking powder
4 t sugar
1 t salt
4 T cold butter, cut into small pieces
2 T cold shortening, cut into pieces
3/4 c cream with a squeeze of lemon juice
Preheat oven to 400. In the food processor, mix together the dry ingredients. Scatter the butter and shortening over the dry ingredients and pulse a few times until the mixture looks like coarse meal. Add the heavy cream and pulse a couple more times, just until the dough comes together. Remove the dough from the bowl of the food processor to a floured board and knead for about 30 seconds. Pat the dough into a rectangle about an inch thick. Fold the left third of the rectangle in towards the center, then fold the right third in towards the center. Fold in the same manner a couple more times. Roll the rectangle gently out into a rectangle about an inch thick, and use a 4-inch round cutter or a glass to cut biscuits. Place the biscuits in an ungreased pan (I use a cake pan) with the sides almost touching. Bake for about 20 minutes, until the tops are golden brown.
