Biscuit Recipes

Biscuits are probably one of the first things a child learns to bake under their parents' watchful eye. Biscuits recipes can be disarmingly simple or quite complicated, but even an easy biscuit recipe can be a bit tricky. Some bakers take years to figure out how to keep even basic biscuits from burning on the bottom! The cure for that is actually simple. If the biscuits are brown around the edges, they're done, no matter what the middle looks like. Take them out of the oven. They'll keep on cooking for a few minutes, but the bottoms won't scorch.

The simplest biscuit recipe involves plain flour, sugar and some kind of shortening, perhaps butter, but after that the sky's the limit. Into this simple batter the baker can throw crushed nuts, candied fruits or peel, dried fruits, smashed up crisps (see below!) and exotic herbs and spices, from cinnamon to saffron. Cake flour is good for biscuits, if the cook wants an extra fluffiness, but plain, all purpose flour is excellent. Also, always use unsalted butter.

As the hols are coming up, learning to bake even plain biscuit recipes is more important than ever. Biscuit recipes follow.