Foodventure: Buttermilk Biscuits

For the last Sunday morning before school started, I thought I'd make a nice breakfast - especially since Errol was in town too. So decided to try out the new biscuit cutter that my mom gave me for Christmas and make my first biscuits from scratch. 

I used the recipe from The New Best Recipe Cookbook that Errol got me a few years ago. 

First you blend together the dry ingredients:

A whole stick of COLD butter, cut into cubes. I even put it in the freezer for a few minutes after I cut it, just to make sure. You want the butter to be cold because when it bakes, those pieces of butter will melt and make yummy air pockets and flakiness.

Add in the buttermilk (I've read you can make your own if you don't have any on hand). 

Now process it until just combined, about 8 pulses. 

Pour it out onto a floured surface and bring it together into a ball. Do it without working the dough very much at all, just push it together. 

Roll it out to the desired thickness. Mine was definitely too thin as you can see; I thought they would rise a bit more, but it could also be because my baking soda is about a year old. 

Put it on a baking pan. You can see on the bottom right corner that that's what I made with the final scraps. No wasting here! Although next time I'll probably work the cracks out, since it came apart once baked. 

And that's all she wrote! We put a variety of things onto the biscuits, including:

• More butter 
• Honey 
• Strawberry preserves
• Apricot preserves