Cream Scones

Lately, I’ve been on a major chocolate chip cookie kick. I have this one particular recipe (this one) that I’ve been making for what feels like forever now. I guess you could say that it’s become my “go-to,” and as much success as I’ve had with it, I’ve grown a bit restless.  There’s so many recipes out there, and I know I haven’t even scratched the surface as far as testing them all! So I’ve been experimenting with chocolate chip cookies a lot in the last few weeks. I’ve made many, many batches and tested tons of recipes, and then one day my boyfriend interrupted my chocolate chip cookie baking spree and suggested that I make something else. Literally, anything else. Anything that wasn’t a chocolate chip cookie. Needless to say, I got the hint. 

I decided to make a batch of scones to win his stomach back (because I still need taste testers, obviously). Scones are one of his favorite baked treats, so I was confident that they would do the trick—all  I had to do was find the perfect recipe. Thanks to my chocolate chip cookie baking mania, I had found myself browsing through cookbooks I didn’t even know I had or hadn’t looked through in a while, and blogs that I had sadly forgotten about, all in search of the perfect cookie recipe. In the process, I stumbled across a lot of recipes that looked like they were worth bookmarking, and this recipe from the Violet Bakery Cookbook was one of them.  I was immediately drawn to these particular recipe because of the way Claire Ptak described the scones in her headnote. “A bit like an American shortcake” and “extra-rich.” I needed no more convincing than that! 

Buttermilk Biscuits with Salty Honey Butter

Here's an example of a recipe that started out with certain intentions and is being posted as something else.  I decided that my blog was lacking in the shortcake department, and I of course needed to fix that.  I have a Strawberry Shortcake in cake form, which happens to be one of my favorite cakes EVER, but I wanted to make some classic shortcakes.  I needed some buttery biscuit, whipped cream, and fruit action, so I set off to find a good biscuit recipe.  I found one, had them in the oven in about 20 minutes (they're so easy), and before I knew it, I had a tray of warm biscuits cooling on my kitchen counter.

I was about to start making the whipped cream for the shortcakes when temptation struck and I just had to have a biscuit while it was still warm from the oven. I mean, I figured it wouldn't hurt to make sure that these biscuits were shortcake-worthy, and I would only take one bite. Just one, so I did...and that's when it happened. The first bite of warm biscuit made me question why I was making strawberry shortcakes.  The second bite of warm biscuit made me think I was crazy.  At the third bite of warm biscuit, I knew that that I was crazy.  The fourth and final bite of warm biscuit made me change my mind about the urgency of posting a strawberry shortcake recipe. These buttermilk biscuits on their own were worthy of a post of their own, and that was a much more urgent matter.

Strawberry-Rhubarb Cobbler

I can't explain to you how happy I am to finally be sharing the recipe for this strawberry-rhubarb cobbler.  No, it's not that I've been waiting and waiting until the perfect moment to share the recipe.  It's also not because I made it several weeks ago and just forgot to share it.  No, my excitement has nothing to do with that.  I'm mostly excited about sharing this recipe because I was able to simply make it.  You wouldn't believe the amount of trouble I had finding rhubarb this spring.  My local supermarket typically carries it for a super short time in the spring and you just have to be lucky enough to be in the supermarket at that time to buy it, but this year, they just weren't carrying it.  In fact, none of the markets near me were stocking rhubarb.  I called several stores to ask if they had any rhubarb, and while a few of them actually said yes, by the time I made it over, it was all gone.  This meant that in the ten minutes it took me to get from my house to the store, some lucky person grabbed the last of the rhubarb.  I was getting frustrated and disheartened.  I'd been searching for the stuff for three weeks and just couldn't seem to catch a break!  My craving for rhubarb-anything wasn't going anywhere though, so I knew I had to keep trying. 

Fortunately for me, my mom decided to help me out with my rhubarb search, and she actually got lucky and found it!  I don't know how she did it, but I was so glad.  The search was over!  I came home on Saturday night to five beautiful stalks of ruby red rhubarb sitting in pitcher of water on my kitchen counter, and it was an amazing sight to see.  It was also perfectly timed, because my mom was having her best friend come over for dinner on Mother's Day, and she goes crazy for anything with rhubarb and strawberries.  Now that I had secured the rhubarb, it was time to figure out what to do with it!

Cheddar-Zucchini Drop Biscuits

Biscuits are pretty irresistible treats, in my opinion.  They're perfect to enjoy with breakfast, or on the side with a home cooked dinner….or whenever really…

I had been craving a savory biscuit of some sort for the longest time now, and quite frankly, I have no idea why it took me so long to get around to making them.  I mean, I made these things in like, five minutes (ok not really, maybe like fifteen since I was photographing the whole time, but if I hadn't been taking photos, I could have definitely made them in five minutes after the zucchini had been sufficiently drained).  There's no real excuse for me having waited this long to make them.  There really isn't, so I'm not even going to come up with one.  

Maybe I was just being lazy.  Or using my procrastination skills.  Maybe a combination of the two.  I need to stop doing that.