Well, Butter my Biscuit!

Check these babies out...

Butter, honey, or gravy?  Yes, please!

My honey made those!  And they were oh-so-delicious with breakfast this morning.  If I may opine for moment:  there is nothing better than freshly baked bread or biscuits.  So imagine my surprise when J. yelled up the stairs at me that breakfast was ready this morning and I came down to find this.

Now what has gotten into that man?  I don't know, but it's all good.  :-)

And if making homemade biscuits wasn't awesome enough, he was also making bread for the first time.  Here it is right after coming out of proofing.

Beautiful.  I told him to punch it down so that I could take a picture of him doing it and instead he stuck his hand on it and pushed down.  Can you see the hand print?

Out of this big ball of dough, he was able to make one full size and one mini size loaf of white bread and ten dinner rolls.  The mini loaf got eaten right out of the oven (of course!)

I think he did a great job, especially after my first try didn't come out so well - it tasted great, but didn't rise enough and had way to much crust.  We ultimately discovered it was because of old yeast.

But this bread was pretty darn close to perfect.  He said the one thing he would do is use the Rapid Proofing setting on our oven the second time around.  And over dinner we talked about using real bread flour instead of white processed and the idea of even grinding our own flour.  There may be a post about choosing grain mills in my future!

So we can officially mark this goal off our list from last year (okay, we're a little late, I know).  If you're interested in trying out our bread recipe, you can find it in this post.  If you want to try out J.'s biscuit recipe, well....here it is!

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Cranky Puppy's Good Morning Biscuits

Makes 6 grand-sized biscuits

Ingredients

• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 tablespoon white sugar
• 8 tablespoons (1/3 cup) of butter or butter-flavored shortening
• 3/4 cup milk or buttermilk

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 425 degrees F.
2. In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, salt, and sugar (or pulse in a food processor).
3. Cut in the shortening until the mixture resembles coarse meal.
4. Gradually stir in milk until dough pulls away from the side of the bowl.
5. Turn out onto a floured surface, and knead 15 to 20 times.
6. Pat or roll dough out to 1 inch thick.
7. Cut biscuits with a large cutter or juice glass dipped in flour. Repeat until all dough is used.
8. Brush off the excess flour, and place biscuits onto an ungreased baking sheet.
9. Bake for 13 to 15 minutes or until edges begin to brown.

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TIP for new biscuit-makers:  Any time you make biscuits (or anything that uses baking powder or soda to rise) you want to gently mix the dough JUST until the ingredients are all mixed.  The more you handle your dough the more the gluten develops and the tougher your biscuits, pie crust, etc. will be.

If you make these or come up with a better recipe based on this one, please let us know! 

I've shared this recipe with this week's Mop It Monday, HomeStead Barn, Show and Tell Saturday hops.  Go check it out!