Simmer Stock - Kitchen scripts: White Chocolate Cream Biscuits

White Chocolate Cream Biscuits

A White Chocolate Cream Biscuit topped with fresh strawberries and whipped cream

One of the easiest and tastiest types of biscuits to make are cream biscuits. The ingredients need be nothing more than all purpose flour, heavy cream, baking powder, salt and a bit of sugar. Preparation requires only mixing, rolling, cutting and baking. None of the cutting-in shortening hassle usually associated with biscuit making. Cream biscuits make excellent savory biscuits (use a little less sugar) topped with a good shmear of butter, or awesome desert biscuits (use a little more sugar), serving as the base for a classic strawberry shortcake. Best of all, they take only twenty minutes to go from raw ingredients to piping hot biscuits fresh out of the oven.

Never one to leave well enough alone, though, I managed to bring the simplest of biscuits to a whole new level with the addition of but one ingredient: white chocolate. The chocolate pieces inside the biscuit melt into the flaky tender dough while the pieces exposed on the outside caramelize giving the biscuit a subtle flavor of roasted marshmallow.

The key to these biscuits, as with all other types of quick bread or cake, is to handle the dough as little as possible once the liquid has been added to the flour. Mixing and kneading the dough develops the gluten in the flour, and the more the gluten develops, the tougher the finished product (read: white chocolate hockey pucks). My method is to stop mixing two stirs before you think you should and/or stop kneading one fold before you think you're done.

But if your biscuits come out a little tougher or heavier than they should, don't worry, and definitely don't throw them out. The beauty of this recipe and the addition of the white chocolate chips is that if you do over mix, you simply present your guests with some of the best white chocolate chip cookies they've ever had!

White Chocolate Cream Biscuits

Makes about a dozen 3-1/2 inch biscuits.

Ingredients

2 cups all purpose flour, plus about 1/2 cup for preparing work surface
1 tablespoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons sugar
1 1/4 cups heavy cream, plus about 1/4 cup for brushing tops of biscuits
6 ounces white chocolate chips (or a bar or block chopped into 1/4 inch pieces)

Directions

Preheat the oven to 425°.
In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, salt and sugar.
Pour in the heavy cream and mix with a wooden spoon or rubber spatula just until the dough comes together. If it's a solid mass, you've mixed it too much. If there's more than a quarter cup or so of dry flour in the bowl you haven't mixed enough.

Dust your work surface with flour and turn out the biscuit dough from the bowl.
Gently flatten the dough with the palm of your hands to about one foot square.
Sprinkle the white chocolate pieces over 1/3 of the biscuit dough. Fold the dough over the chocolate and gently press down on the dough with your (well floured) hands to seal in the pieces.
Fold the dough over again (so you once again have a square) and roll the dough out (with a rolling pin or pat out with the palms of your hands) to a thickness of about 1/2 to 3/4 of an inch.
Cut out your biscuits with a biscuit cutter (or a glass or a cleaned out soup can or just use a knife and make square biscuits) and place them on an cookie sheet or sheet pan (no need to grease, there's enough fat in the cream that the biscuits wont stick).

Brush tops of biscuits with heavy cream (the fat in the cream helps the top brown).
Bake the biscuits for 12-15 minutes or until the tops are golden brown.
Let the biscuits cool (on a cooling rack, a plate or whatever) for at least five minutes before slicing or eating (lest the chocolate run all over the place or burn the taste buds right off your tongue).

Posted on Jun 23, 2002 @ 07:31 PM