BISCUIT-OFF 2008

Miss M was visiting this weekend. Among other activities on our whirlwind schedule, we decided one thing would be accomplished. Between the two of us, we would make a tasty, tender biscuit. We decided to compare two recipes - an easy, three-ingredient approach from Southern Living and a more complex recipe from Martha Stewart Living (will link later). By morning's end, we would make history.

Here are our tools of battle. The Southern Living recipe required only self-rising flour, butter, and buttermilk. The Martha Stewart recipe called for all-purpose flour, cake flour, buttermilk, butter, shortening, salt, baking powder, baking soda, and a bit of sugar.
We started with the basic recipe. It came together VERY easily, it was a nice, sticky dough and the directions were fairly clear on how to work it. We formed our little biscuits and got them on the pan, ready to bake. These biscuits are friendly and like to be close together.
Midway through baking, we decided to brush them with butter to give them some color.
Meanwhile, we got the dry ingredients together for the more complex Martha Stewart recipe.
Skip ahead to the lovely much larger biscuits in the oven - these baked all separate and lonely. But they stand proud and tall regardless.
A face-off. Martha vs. Southern Living. Big vs. Small. Who wins?
Well, we needed to test. I made sausage gravy. Mmm.
A very BRIGHT picture of a Southern eggs benedict - biscuit, gravy, egg.
Regular ol' gravy and biscuits for me, thanks. Eggs are my enemy.
Oh, and wait - what about strawberry shortcake?
And the winner is....both of them. Well, perhaps the biscuit love-child of both of them. We decided we liked aspects of both. The ease of the SL biscuit, combined with the size of the ML biscuit, the sugar in the ML biscuit, plus some techniques of the SL biscuit using the lonely baking techniques of the ML biscuit...prepare yourself in the future for the uber-biscuit.