Emily’s Baking Powder Biscuits and Scones from the Banff Springs
For Mothers’ Day, Ali taught Emily how to make baking powder biscuits. We ate them for dessert, split and filled with strawberries, after a roast ham, beans baked in the slow cooker, and new potatoes. Sadly, the corner store was out of whipping cream, and E came home with a tub of Cool Whip. It was like putting Cheese Whiz on freshly baked bread.
They were pretty delicious biscuits. Made with butter (not shortening, as the recipe below suggests), they weren’t as tall as some, but had a tender crumb, split beautifully and were quite perfect looking, like something you might see in a store.
Ali is a good cook, and tends to hang on to a recipe for dear life if she finds one she likes. This is the sole recipe taped to her fridge, torn from the Fannie Farmer Cookbook:
And, as promised, the recipe for scones from the Fairmont Banff Springs. It’s a large recipe – but who knows? Someone out there may have occasion to make ten dozen scones? If you have a kitchen scale (and I really think everyone should, it makes baking so much easier and more accurate) it would be easy to cut it down to a more manageable quantity. I’ll do that another time – I promised myself I’d be in bed by 11 tonight (CBC tomorrow morning) and it’s 11:02.
Scones for Afternoon Tea at the Banff Springs
thanks to Executive Pastry Chef Stephen Garton
2 kg Bread Flour
2 kg Pastry Flour
40 g Salt
1.2 kg Unsalted Butter
800 g Granulated Sugar
150 g Baking Powder
12 large Eggs
1.6 L Buttermilk
500 g raisins (optional)Mix butter, sugar, salt, baking powder and flours into a crumble mixture. Mix in milk and eggs until just incorporated. Roll out dough to about 18-20 mm thick. Cut desired size.
Bake at 170C (about 340F) for about 15 minutes, or until golden. Note *Our ovens are convection. Regular ovens can take longer.
Makes about 120 scones.
May 10 2010 | bread | 18 Comments »
