First, I made my favorite breakfast ever, biscuits and gravy. It's pretty easy to make, just start with your favorite recipe for biscuits, then add gravy. I use the recipe in "The Joy of Cooking" for basic rolled biscuits. The only difference is that I used half butter and half butter-flavored shortening whereas the recipe in the book just calls for butter. I think the shortening makes the dough a lot lighter. If you ever have time, make one batch of dough with all butter and one batch with some shortening and compare the two, the difference in texture is astounding. Anyway, I made a double batch. The first half was made into biscuits:
They look petty good, and they taste wonderful. Just salty enough, light and fluffy, I really outdid myself this time. I made some gravy to go on top of the biscuits. I don't have any pictures of the gravy by itself; it's pretty bland-looking, but it tastes amazing. It's just a bechamel sauce with added pork sausage and lots (and I mean lots) of pepper. The secret to a good gravy for biscuits it to add pepper until you think you've added too much, and then add a bit more. Trust me, it's amazing.
The second half of my biscuit dough went into making monkey bread. If you're not familiar with monkey bread, look it up, it's some great stuff. Most recipes you find these days call for canned biscuits, but they don't really sell those here in the UK, so this is my first attempt using home-made biscuit dough. I just rolled it out and cut it into strips. Then you shake it in a bag with sugar and cinnamon, and pour some brown sugar and butter over it. When I was done, it didn't look so good:
Next time, I'm going to make a few changes. First, I don't have a bundt pan, which is kind of how it's made. Instead, I have a springform pan that has a bundt insert. It just isn't the same, so next time I'm going to use an honest bundt pan. Second, I cut the dough into strips, and I think I should have gone with balls. The strips just didn't bond well together. Third, I need more dough, look at that picture up there, that's some paltry looking monkey bread. Finally, I need to use different sugar. I used demerara sugar because that's what I have, but traditionally, you're supposed to use white sugar. The demerara just didn't stick to the dough, so instead of a sweet coating that gets covered in gooey caramel, you get a cinnamon coating that gets covered in gooey caramel. Not terrible, but not quite right. Next time, I may use some caster sugar. That's sure to stick. Still it all tastes good. Butter and sugar: how could it not taste good? And look at the texture in the bread:
That is light, fluffy, and delicious. This really is my best batch of biscuit dough ever.
To wrap things up, here's a picture of me enjoying the fruits of my labor:
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