What I Learned Today

Today I learned what happens when you forget to add baking powder to biscuits. More accurately, maybe I learned to read the recipe more carefully. :/ I was merrily talking with my sister and trying to throw together some quick biscuits to go with our chicken curry (yeah, we have weird menu combinations sometimes). This recipe seemed like a good google-find, with final-product photos of light, fluffy, delicious biscuits. I mixed up the dough, kneaded, rolled it out, cut circles, and put them on the baking sheet. We popped them in the oven. Oddly, 13 minutes later, they were still flat. I figured I’d missed some sort of rising agent, but it took a more careful read to figure out what that was:

Ingredients:
1/2 cup cold butter or margarine
2 1/4 c self rising soft wheat flour
1 1/4 c buttermilk (or whole milk with a tablespoon of lemon juice added)
flour for dusting
melted butter for brushing baked biscuits

Yeah, I’d read right over the “self-rising” part. Whoever heard of “self-rising” flour anyway? Not me! I’d skipped ahead to the recipe steps, which simply refer to “flour”. My post-mortem inspection also revealed this note, which I should have spotted the first time around:

To make your own self rising flour, simply add 1 1/2 tsp baking powder and 1/2 tsp salt for EACH cup of all purpose flour.

Oddly enough, I had noticed (and even commented on) the lack of salt in the recipe… but completely missed the lack of baking powder. Duh! What a stupid mistake! And here I had been all proud because I made risotto last night without a recipe (and with new ingredients I’d never tried) (and it was *good*!). The “biscuits” came out as little flat wafers that are basically inedible (especially if you were hoping for fluffy jam-platforms instead). I won’t even bother with a photo (too embarrassing). Well, next time I hope I’ll pay more attention to the recipe. Excuse me while I return to my self-flagellation.