must. make. biscuits.

Every Sunday morning I make biscuits in a quest to make the closest biscuit I can to a Bojangles biscuit. I've been doing this for about 2 months now, maybe a little longer. Having been through a lot of recipes by now, all of them being to dry or too bland or too small or not soft enough, I finally found a decent recipe 2 weeks ago. The first time I made them though, they were too small- I didn't have a cutter with sharp enough edges in the right size- and not very buttery, but they were soft and the recipe was simple (Alton Brown, of course). The next week I screwed them up by trying to use a bigger cutter with dull edges, so they didn't puff up- which means they were too hard. Finally, this week, I used the lid to the peanut butter jar to cut and added 4 extra tbsp of butter-- and they were just about perfect! Here you go:

And then I went one step further, and made Bo Berry Biscuits!

Here's the recipe for the plain biscuits (for the Bo Berry, I just folded blueberries in the 3rd knead of the dough. You can use pretty much any old powder sugar glaze on top- make sure you put a little lemon juice in it, though):

2 C. all purpose flour

4 tsp. baking powder

1/4 tsp. baking soda

3/4 tsp. salt

6 Tbsp. butter (original recipe calls for 2)

2 Tbsp. shortening

1 C. buttermilk

1) Mix dry ingredients in large bowl.

2) Cut in butter and crisco, until mixture looks like crumbs.

3) Make a well in center of mixture, pour in butter milk. GENTLY mix until dough is moistened-- be careful not to overmix. It won't form a firm dough in the bowl. So just do the best you can to get it into one blob in as few rotations with the spoon as possible.

4)Flour your hands really well, pick up the blob and knead it (no more than 10 times, try to stick with around 5 or 6) on a VERY well floured surface. Be super gentle with it. The less you handle it, the better it will rise in the oven. Pat it out to about 1/2 an inch thick.

5) Use a cutter (apparently a peanut butter jar lid is perfect size/sharp edge) to cut out biscuits- just straight down, don't twist it (if you blunt the edges of the biscuits by twisting, it won't rise well).

6) They go onto an ungreased baking sheet, edges touching. 450 for 15-20 minutes.

7) If doing Bo Berry, glaze right out of the oven!