Super lite biscuit-scones

'Am I a biscuit or a scone ? But for now, I am a biscuit-scone '

I must credit this blogger at happyhomebaking.blogspot.com for helping me make this possible. After searching high and low all over the internet to recreate the lost taste of my favorite Macdonald's biscuit, long withdrawn from the Singapore breakfast menu,  it is one full circle back to one of my favorite food bloggers.

The consequence of not following instructions :

But being a true-blooded impulsive and impatient person, there was some procedural lapse, caused by poor preparation and then some more by not following procedure to the T. And so, I ended up with this rather dome shaped biscuit. The saving grace is that it did turn out to be an extremely light biscuit as HHB promised.

Substituting cake flour with plain/corn flour :

Due to logistical oversight, I was 100g short of cake flour, which is almost half of what is needed to make the biscuits. I pushed my luck to the max, replaced it with 80g plain flour and 2 tablespoons corn flour. The specter of ending with a heavy biscuit was put to rest when the end product was light in texture. Of course, for the next time round, I shall use 100 % cake flour for the real superlite version.

How to prevent my hands from melting the butter :

Happyhomebaking did emphasize again and again to chill the ingredients throughout the preparation process so that the butter rubbed into the flour mix does not melt and cause an amalgam resulting in hard and dense biscuits. This, I kept in mind, chilling flour, milk, eggs and bowl. 

All the fuss about temperature control was well worth the effort. This is my lightest biscuit-scone ever.

In addition, I used the food processor to replace the manual task of rubbing in the butter, to avoid hand contact with the cold butter. A cold fork was also used to stir in  the wet ingredients ( egg + milk ) into the rubbed-in flour in a chilled bowl, shaping the dough and transferring to the tray. In all, handling with hand was almost zero. I felt almost like a surgeon, minus scalpel and needle.

Time is an important ingredient in baking :

But the demands of waiting for 30 minutes before adding the wet ingredients and another wait before cutting out the biscuits is a  challenge for me, who is unwilling to wait. Thankfully, as most of the dry ingredients were frozen before I started, the unhappy dense biscuit-scone did not happen. Still, a 'cooling time' would have enhanced the shape of the baked biscuit-scone.

Finally a genuine mistake : forgetting to brush the scone with milk, though I suspect that the dough which is not  adequately chilled would have been dented with a single stroke of the brush. 

Thank goodness it turned out better than expected. Phew! Beginner's luck it must be but tsk-tsk, not again if I am to take this biscuit thing seriously.

For the full recipe, check out http://happyhomebaking.blogspot.com/2009/07/biscuits-or-scones.html