A plate of apple cheddar biscuits with fresh picked oranges, limes, lemons, and kumquats from our friends houses
There’s a cookie tube one block from my office. Yup, a cookie tube. It used to be a corner, flower shop but the approximately five-foot-diameter, glass-enclosed tube is now the home of Batter Bakery, hands down the best place to get a scone in San Francisco. My colleagues and I frequent Batter way too often and in an effort to keep my budget and diet in check, I decided to bake my own breakfast snack in the form of apple cheddar biscuits.
Working with How to Cook Everything
I was going to bake scones until I opened How to Cook Everything and read Mark Bittman‘s description of them a “really just ultra-rich biscuits, with cream as the primary liquid ingredient.” That sounds delicious every once and a while but not everyday. Thus, I went with the biscuit recipe (also probably not an everyday always kind of snack but hey, I’m in marathon training and this recipe is not that egregious). My favorite scone at Batter of late is its Apple Cheddar Scone so I added a handful of apple cubes and grated cheddar cheese to Bittman’s recipe (and also substituted the “yogurt or buttermilk” with cottage cheese cause that’s what I had at home and I was curious how it’d turn out, which was well). Here’s how it went down.
Insides of an apple cheddar biscuit
Apple Cheddar Biscuits
(adapted from Mark Bittman’s Yogurt or Buttermilk Biscuits from How to Cook Everything)
Yield: 6
Ingredients:
1 cup cake flour plus more as needed
Scant 1/2 teaspoon salt
1-1/2 teaspoon backing powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
2 tablespoons cold butter
1/2 cup 2%, small curd cottage cheese
1/2 apple, peeled and cut into small cubes
2 ounces cheddar cheese, cut into small cubes (I grated the cheese, which made it get lost in the mix. Cutting the cheese into small cubes should fix this)
Ingredients, plus butter (which was staying cold in the fridge)
Method:
Heat the oven to 450F. Mix the dry ingredients together in a bowl. Cut butter into bit and blend into dry ingredients by rubbing butter with dry ingredients between fingers. Thoroughly blend all butter into dry mixture before moving on. Add cottage cheese, apple cubes, and cheddar cheese cubes to mixture and stir until a ball just forms. Turn out dough on a lightly floured surface and knead 10 times. Roll into a log and cut into six circles. Place on ungreased baking sheet and bake 7 to 9 minutes or until golden brown. Enjoy.
Cutting the dough into biscuit circles
Ready to put the biscuits into the oven
Mmm... a hot biscuit (They were good all week eaten at room temperature too. Store in an airtight container.)
I made a variation of these! But they had bacon. Delicious!!