Friday, May 2, 2014

That "Can" Do Attitude!

Let's carry on with our recipe fun fridays!

One of the easiest recipes I have found in the last year came simply from making a few modifications to the back of a can.

On the baking powder can, there is a recipe for biscuits. Since the large majority of the ingredients are not safe for us, instead of saying drat and moving on, I decided to throw in a few subs and voila! Biscuits!




Can-Do Biscuits
1 cup masa (or other safe flour)
1/2 cup quinoa flour
1/2 cup quinoa flakes
1 Tbsp baking powder (remember-- if avoiding corn, HAIN is corn-free)
6 Tbsp shortening (or coconut oil. We use palm shortening)
1 tsp salt
1 cup safe milk (we use coconut)
1 Tbsp safe vinegar (we use coconut vinegar)

Preheat your oven to 425 degrees F and lightly oil a parchment-lined baking pan. Generally, I use a large lasagna pan for this recipe but a cookie sheet would also work wonderfully.

Mix together the flours,, baking powder and salt. Using a fork, work the shortening into the flour mixture until entirely blended--- you should have a result that resembles coarse crumbs. Next, pour in half of the milk and blend well. Assess the consistency. You will want dough that is able to be rolled out. Pour in anywhere from 1/2 to all of the remaining half cup of milk (I usually use all f it, but sometimes I use a bit less, hence the range). Once milk is blended completely into the mix, THEN add the vinegar and only mix until worked into the dough. Let it rest for 2 minutes.

Form the dough into a large ball and place on top of a large piece of parchment paper. Place a second piece of parchment paper on top and roll the dough out evenly to be around 1/4 inch or just slightly thicker. Using a juice glass or biscuit cutter (or for fun, shaped cookie cutters!) cut out biscuits and place onto prepared baking sheet. Continue to roll out dough and cut out biscuits until all of the dough has been used.

optional: You can glaze these biscuits for a nice effect. All you need is

1 part honey
1 part safe oil
1 part safe milk

You may want to warm up the glaze mixture in the microwave slightly, just so the honey blends easily with the oil and milk. Blend with a spoon and lightly brush onto tops of unbaked biscuits.

Bake for 10-15 minutes, or until nicely golden brown on tops. The thinner biscuits will take less time, thicker ones will take longer. If you like salty things like B does, you may want to sprinkle salt over top of the biscuits when they come out of the oven.

Do these freeze well?  Yes, they do! I prefer to freeze the uncooked dough.

What I will do is roll out the dough and cut it completely into biscuits. Then, I bake the biscuits I want for that day and freeze the rest. To freeze the pre-cut, uncooked biscuits, i simply place them between layers of parchment or freezer paper and freeze them in a covered freezer container. If you are tight on freezer space, once they have been frozen in the container, you can transfer them to freezer bags to store in a smaller space.

When ready to bake the frozen biscuits,  use the same instructions that I described above in terms of temperature and pan preparation. Your time for cooking may vary slightly so you may want to keep a closer eye on this.