Homemade Cinnamon Biscuits (aka “Scones”)
By David & Martha Cox 03/11/2010
If you haven’t noticed during your forays to the grocery store, you can buy a can of biscuits for about $1-$1.50.
That’s a decent deal, but it’s not quite as good as the deal you can get by baking them yourself.
Now, technically the recipe I’ve outlined here is a recipe for cinnamon scones. In reality, scones and biscuits aren’t that different (unless you’re in Europe), so we aren’t going to worry too much about semantics. With that settled, let’s get down to it.
Ingredients:
- 2/3 Cup of milk/buttermilk
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 2 Cups of Flour
- 1/3 Cup of Sugar
- 1 teaspoon cinnamon
- 1 Tablespoon of Baking Powder (not Baking Soda)
- 1/4 teaspoon of salt
- Butter (anywhere from about 3 Tablespoons to a whole stick; it’s up to you)
- 1 Egg slightly beaten
The Process:
- Preheat oven to 400 degrees (Fahrenheit)
- Blend dry ingredients together in a mixing bowl
- If you want to make decadent cinnamon scones, get a whole stick of butter out; if you don’t feel like having a heart attack this morning, one-fourth to one-half a stick of butter for this next part will more than suffice. Cut the butter into chunks, dropping each piece into the bowl full of dry ingredients. Mix it all well, and move on.
- In a separate container, mix your wet ingredients. Pour them on top of your dry ingredients.
- Mix everything really well, until it looks like really lumpy dough.
- Next get out a sided cookie sheet, and grease it with some Crisco (off-brand shortening is actually not as good as Crisco; splurge on name brand here, and get the real thing: Crisco). This will prevent our biscuits from sticking to the pan as they cook. A paper towel or small brush will make it much easier to grease the cookie sheet.
- Using a spoon–and maybe your freshly washed hands–form biscuit-size lumps of dough evenly spaced on the greased cookie sheet. Try not to make the biscuits too thick, or they may not cook evenly.
- Pop the cookie sheet into the oven for about 15-20 minutes–or until the tops of the biscuits turn golden brown. When they’re done, remove them from the oven, let them cool a minute, and enjoy!
From start to finish, this recipe takes about 30-40 minutes, depending on how fast you are. It may not be something you can throw together in no time, but it is a nice treat every once in a while.
Be sure to use a sided cookie sheet. Sometimes the butter in the biscuits melts and runs across the sheet. If the cookie sheet doesn’t have sides, the butter could run right onto your stove’s burners, making for a nasty mess and a lot of smoke (listen to the voice of experience here).
Tip: Add a 1/4 Cup of raisins or blueberries to the recipe for an even tastier treat.
It’s hard to assign a hard and fast dollar value to this recipe because you’re using such relatively small quantities of ingredients. I am confident, however, that these biscuits go further than the canned variety you find at the store, and that you’ll save money in the long run by baking them yourself rather than buying them premade (not to mention that these biscuits taste so much better).
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