cream biscuits
I woke up this rainy Sunday morning and thought, “Let’s make oatmeal for breakfast.” When I discovered that we had only a scant 1/2 cup of steel cut oats left I thought, “Let’s make biscuits for breakfast. And then slather them with butter and honey.” Don’t be fooled by the whole wheat pastry flour; these biscuits are pretty fluffy and fatty (the whole batch has around 1900 calories, around 60 percent of which are from fat) and don’t really need extra butter slathered on top, in my opinion. You could also skip the whole wheat pastry flour and just use 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour.
(recipe adapted from Alice Waters’ The Art of Simple Cooking)
1 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 cup whole wheat pastry flour*
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons baking powder
up to 4 teaspoons sugar (optional. I used 2 teaspoons and the biscuits were just a little bit sweet)
3 to 6 tablespoons cold unsalted butter, cut into small pieces (I find that 3 tablespoons make them plenty rich, and 6 is just too too much)
3/4 cup cream
Preheat oven to 400 degrees F.
Combine flour, salt, baking powder, and sugar in a bowl. Add butter and combine using a pastry blender, until the butter is the size of small peas. Reserve 2 tablespoons of the cream, and pour the rest into the flour and butter mixture. Using a fork, mix just until combined. If the dough isn’t coming together and seems too dry, add a little bit of the reserved cream.
Knead the dough lightly in the bowl until it seems smooth-ish, then put it on a lightly floured cutting board or counter. Roll dough about 3/4-inch thick, then cut into squares or circles (I used a shot glass to make little biscuits). Arrange biscuits on a parchment-lined baking sheet, then brush the tops with reserved cream. Bake for 17 minutes (for my tiny-sized biscuits), or until tops are golden brown.
* Pastry flour contains less gluten (the protein component of wheat) than all-purpose flour. Gluten is what makes things like pizza dough elastic and bread chewy (which is why bread flour is on the other end of the spectrum from pastry flour: it has a higher gluten content than all-purpose flour). Gluten is also the thing in wheat that those with celiac disease react to. Okay fine, I guess I should save this for a wheat post someday.
