From brownies to biscuits

No, your eyes do not deceive you--that is not a picture of White Chocolate Brownies.  I haven't been having much luck with Tuesdays with Dorie recipe selections for the past few weeks.  A couple weeks ago was Apple-Apple Bread Pudding.  I'm not a big fan of custardy things, and didn't get a chance to try it anyway, with all the illness around here.  Last week I skipped the Banana Coconut Ice Cream Pie.  Coconut is evil and is generally banned from entering this house, and I'm not that excited about banana desserts, either.  So going into this week, I knew I should really participate so I wouldn't miss three weeks in a row.  But I wasn't exactly thrilled about the latest recipe, either, since I don't really like white chocolate.  That's too bad, because I've recently gotten to know this week's host, Marthe of Culinary Delights, via Twitter, and I wanted to make the recipe because of that.  So I decided to try to overcome my dislike of white chocolate and try them anyway.

Sadly, that try wasn't very successful.  Now, I admit, I did play around with the recipe just a bit.  I had white chocolate, but after tasting it, I realized that it had been in my pantry way too long.  So I tossed it, and tried milk chocolate instead (similar sweetness, I figured).  I skipped the meringue topping.  And I tried making individual brownies in my muffin tin, to avoid the problem that many people reported of their brownies being under-done in the middle.  The taste wasn't that bad, but the texture was very unappealing.  Soggy from the raspberries, and as my friend Nancy put it, rather spongy.  Not good.  And not even photogenic:

So what to do?  Well, I decided to do a rewind as well.  One of the recipes that I missed recently was the Sweet Cream Biscuits that were picked by Melissa of Love at First Bite back in April.  Hard to believe I missed them, since the recipe is a quick one to make.  But we had a chance to try them for breakfast on Monday morning.

Only five ingredients--flour, baking powder, a bit of sugar and salt and a bunch of heavy cream--go into these biscuits.  That means they only dirty one bowl, which is always nice.  You whisk together the dry ingredients, then add the cream and mix it with a fork.  The dough gets lightly kneaded to bring it together, then rolled out to a thickness of about half an inch.  I used a cutter that was just a bit over two inches in diameter, and got 16 biscuits (11 or 12 on the first pass, and the rest after rerolling the scraps).  I put the biscuits close together on a parchment-lined baking sheet and baked them at 425F for about 15 minutes, I think.  By the time they were done, I was tired of hearing from the girls about how they were starving, so we didn't really let them cool at all before digging in. =)

The verdict?  Well, Brianna and Gillian each ate three, so I guess they liked them. =)  (They really weren't very big, so that isn't as impressive as it sounds.)  It gave them a chance to sample the various jams in the fridge, too.  No one wanted the cherry (I must have bought that for Jamie), but blueberry, blackberry and raspberry all made it to the table.  Even just with butter (the way I ate one of mine), these were very good.  I definitely think they'll make future appearances around here, especially since they're so easy to make.

If you'd like to give the brownie recipe a try, head on over to Marthe's blog.  Hopefully you'll have better luck than I did.  You can see what the other TWD bakers did with this recipe on this week's Leave Your Links post.  And be sure to check out Clara's blog--she's been waiting a very long time for this day to come. =)  For the biscuits, Melissa has the recipe on her TWD post.