This is not your typical biscuit you find at home. The biscuit i grew up with was crispy, slight hard and/or crumbly – those are English biscuits. This biscuit, which i am about to share is the North American biscuit. It’s not dissimilar to the british scones, just very much less sweet and very plain and buttery. It’s perfect with just a simple butter and jam OR you can make it into a sandwich with your favorite cold meats.
Anyway, I took to making my own biscuits when i saw this programme on TV (from the cooking channel) and they were making biscuits. It looks darn easy to make and deliciously tempting. The recipe is very simple – you may just find everything you need right at home but the thing is, you really need practice to make the biscuits fluffy enough to rise beautifully. Over kneading the dough will lead to a hard and chewy biscuit…not unpalatable, just unpleasant all the same.
I got my recipe from The Joy of Baking – author of the recipe is Stephanie Jaworski.
I’m gonna repaste the recipe here but you can go ahead and click on the link above for their recipe there. However, here, I will be adding some of my own personal tips in making your first biscuit attempt a success 
Recipe:
2 1/2 cups (350 grams) all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon (12 grams) baking powder/ baking soda (mix both for best results: 1tbsp baking powder and 2 teaspoon baking soda)
1/2 teaspoon (2.5 grams) salt
1 tablespoon (14 grams) granulated white sugar
1/2 cup (113 grams) cold unsalted butter, cut into small pieces
1 large egg, lightly beaten
Topping:
1 large egg, lightly beaten with 1 tablespoon milk
Method:
1. First, chop up the butter into small cubes and leave it in the freezer before you prepare anything else. Yes, the freezer, you don’t want soft, melter butter, you want them to be hard enough to manage when you add them to the dry ingredients.
2. Preheat your oven 400 degrees F or 205 degrees C
3. Then, add flour, baking powder, sugar and salt in a large bowl. You can sift it but I just use my metal whisk to mix it – this achieves the same effect as sifting. So if you don’t have a sift, use your whisk Make sure everything is mixed evenly, last thing you want is biting into an area that’s really salty or bitter (from clumps of baking powder)
4. When everything is mixed properly, take your cubed butter pieces and throw it into the flour mixture. With your finger tips, lightly mix the ingredients till it resembles course bread crumbs. You want to have bits and pieces of butter because it is this that creates air pockets when it gets baked in the oven – it creates very nice and fluffy texture.
5. Add your milk and egg into the floured mixture and knead. I cannot stress how gently you should do this…knead till there is form but still floury. Pour the dough on a counter top and knead it gently around a few times (let’s say 3 times). The end product will look like a big dough of lumpy mess. That’s fine. It looks much better when it’s out of the oven.
6. Use a rolling pin (or my cilindrical sugar bottle 
) and roll the dough into 1/2 inch thick. Use a big round cookie cutter OR just be like me and use a glass and cut into the dough for nice little circles. Place the the cut up dough on a tray with aluminium foil or baking sheets. Repeat until you get excess dough hanging about – just knead them up and into a dough (gently, don’t over knead) and roll them out to 1/2 inch thick again and continue cutting you’ve used up all the excess dough.
7. Beat 1 egg with 1 tbsp milk and brush it on top of the dough before baking.
8. Bake for 10-15 minutes (it takes 17 minutes on my oven) and you’ll have nice freshly baked North American Biscuits.
They keep well for up to a week in an air tight container.
