♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ - So what's there to say about baking powder biscuits?

I've been making them for literally 50 years and there isn't much to it.

It's pretty straightforward.

Well, two things-- one, I want to make it without a recipe.

So we've come up with a two-one biscuit recipe-- two cups of flour, everything else is one.

Number two, we're actually going to roll it out a couple times and fold it and roll it.

And we're going to get a super high biscuit with lots of layers.

So please stay tuned as we rethink how to do the classic American baking powder biscuit without a recipe and with great rise and a high hat.

- Funding for this series was provided by the following.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ So baking powder biscuits I've been making since, I don't... the 1970s.

I make them every Saturday morning.

And I had an old recipe from Nika Hazelton, who wrote a book on American home cooking.

She said, like, don't work the dough too much.

And I had to be very careful.

And I got a decent biscuit out of it.

But after making some Mexican biscuits that had yeast and baking powder and they were very tall, I really wanted to get more height out of this thing.

I wanted the better biscuit.

So the other thing I wanted was a recipe without a recipe.

Right?

I have a little formula.

So this is called two and one-- two cups of flour, everything else is one.

Okay, so we'll start with the flour.

All-purpose flour, a tablespoon of sugar, a teaspoon each baking powder, baking soda, and then a teaspoon of kosher salt.

If I'm using salted butter, I'll probably cut that down to half a teaspoon.

Okay, so now we have cold butter.

It's one stick to go with my formula.

This is just like making pie dough the way I make it, which is really rip that butter into the flour.

You want it fully coating the flour.

So I say like 12 pulses, something like that.

(processor whirring) So if you don't have a food processor, just want to do it by hand, you can work the butter into the dry ingredients.

Once you've mixed them up with your fingers, with your hands, takes two or three minutes.

So that is an option.

And that's how people used to make baking powder biscuits.

So when I'm making it Saturday morning at around 6:15, I just have a carton of buttermilk.

I don't bother measuring.

It's about a cup.

So we're just gonna put that in.

I'll put in a bunch of it and start working it.

I don't use my hands here because it's gonna get super sticky.

So I do use a spatula.

And that should do it, hopefully.

Okay, now the hands go in.

You wanna flour the board fairly well for this 'cause it's sticky.

Now, in the old days, the Nika Hazelton approach, I was very careful about not touching this dough too much.

I found with this, however, you can actually work the dough a little.

Okay, so we're gonna roll it out into a rectangle.

I don't bother measuring.

So this is the part I let my kids do.

By the way, people often ask me, like, what's a great recipe to make with your kids?

I think this is the number one recipe because they love dough, they love playing with it.

Okay, so that's good enough.

So we're going to just fold it like a letter like that.

I like to clean this off a little so nothing sticks.

Again, I'm working the dough a lot more than I used to, but I get better results.

Fold it again, flip it over.

Clean this off.

A little more flour.

Okay, so we're going to roll this out kind of gently now just to about an inch or so.

You know, you can do smaller ones, you can do bigger ones.

It doesn't really matter.

The bigger ones will tend not to sort of high hat over.

If you have a narrower biscuit cutter, it'll go up high and then sort of go over.

And it's a good idea to flour the cutter.

Okay, six so far.

I find on the second rolling, I tend to leave the dough a little thicker.

since it's been worked a little more so you get a similar amount of height.

Okay, these go into a very hot oven, 425.

Now, a word about convection.

I put these in my oven on convection and they're done in about ten minutes.

And I don't turn the oven down from 425 to 400.

That's typical conventional wisdom, right, with, with using convection, I find they brown better.

They really brown nicely and I get even a slightly better rise.

So if you have convection, go ahead and throw it on convection.

Without convection it's probably around 12 minutes or so.

♪ ♪ I mean, that's a good looking biscuit, folks.

By the way, I interviewed someone about the self-rising flour in the South.

Making biscuits was a daily thing, which was not really true in New England.

So that's why self-rising flour became so popular, because it was a convenience if every morning you got up and made biscuits.

My kids don't like jam.

I don't know why.

I don't think they've ever had jam in their life.

So I'm going to start with just butter.

♪ ♪ Mm.

That is a mighty tasty biscuit.

I like them really soft and tender inside, crisp top and bottom.

Just can't go wrong.

This recipe completely changed the way I think about biscuits because I just have to remember two numbers.

I can remember two numbers.

Two and one, right?

Two cups of flour, one of everything else.

Put it in a really hot oven for about 12 minutes, and you're done.

And that folding actually gives you more height.

So I call them high-hat biscuits like this because the hat kind of falls over, or you can call them two and one biscuits.

Whatever you call them, you don't need a recipe and they are fabulous biscuits.

♪ ♪ - This French dessert called gâteau magique translates as magic cake.

And it really lives up to its name.

Now, there's nothing special about the seven ingredients that go into the batter, but it's the method of making the batter that is full of what we would normally think of as "baking mistakes," but we're actually gonna make those mistakes on purpose.

But the magic from the title of this recipe comes once it goes into the oven.

That batter separates while baking into three distinct layers.

So the first step is to melt the butter, and we're going to take it a little bit further than melting and actually let it get a deep, nutty brown.

So this will melt slowly at first, and then it will start sizzling, it starts bubbling, and then you need to let it cook until it gets nutty brown on the bottom.

And this might take four to six minutes.

Okay, you need to check this as it browns.

You can tilt the pan back and forth, and you can see the brown on the bottom, or you can shake it a little bit.

And we've got a nice, deep, nutty brown.

So you wanna get it out of the pan pretty quickly into a small bowl, because you wanna stop the cooking.

If you leave it in the pan, it will continue to cook, and it could actually turn into burnt butter, which is one mistake of this recipe you don't wanna make.

Great.

So we'll let that sit and cool for a little while, and then we'll move over to the mixer.

Now, we have separated the eggs for this recipe, and we have just the yolks and some light brown sugar.

And the brown sugar really adds another level of sort of butterscotchy flavor to this.

It's really nice.

We'll whip the yolks and the sugar together on medium high for about five minutes.

The volume will double.

They'll become opaque in color and a little bit of aeration will happen.

(mixer whirring) The yolks and the sugar are ready.

Look at that volume.

Very, very slow ribbon falling from the beater, which is great.

Close this back up, turn it back on low, and we'll drizzle in that brown butter we made.

Then we have vanilla and milk.

That goes in next.

I'll just add the vanilla in here first.

Stream that in.

Now you can see this batter is getting really liquidy, which is unusual for a cake batter, but this is what it's supposed to be.

Then I'm going to combine the salt and the flour.

And add that in.

Okay, here's mistake number one.

Gonna finish stirring this in by hand.

That's the flour, that is.

You're gonna get very clumpy little bits of flour in here.

And that's exactly what you want.

We'll transfer this to a separate large bowl because we're gonna clean out the mixer bowl and then we're gonna use this to make an overbeaten meringue.

Egg whites are in the bowl.

Now that is important.

But our mistake here is we are going to whip these whites with nothing added to them.

There's no stabilizing sugar, no acid such as cream of tartar or lemon juice to help keep those egg whites together.

Whipping egg whites by themselves is the fastest way to get an overwhipped meringue.

And that's what we're about to do.

We'll start on medium speed for about a minute till they get fully foamy.

Then we're gonna crank up the speed and let them whip themselves into a frenzy, where we're looking for stiff peak actually, but they will also be pretty dry and clumpy.

(mixer whirring) Okay, these are looking good.

They're still very loose and liquidy, but they're fully opaque.

I'm going to increase the speed to medium high and let them whip to their heart's content.

(mixer speed increases) This is about as stress-free as a meringue gets.

(laughs) (chuckles) Now can you see the difference?

Okay, so the next thing we're going to do that no real baking recipe ever says to do is we're going to dump all of this meringue at once into our batter and start folding.

Now we have a clumpy overbeaten meringue here.

We have a very loose and liquidy batter.

This already is a recipe for disaster, but it's exactly what we want to happen right now.

Okay.

I'm telling you, this is fun.

As you fold the meringue 'cause you're cutting through it with a spatula, the meringue is starting to break up into smaller pieces, but we want to leave the meringue in small pieces about half to three-quarters of an inch or so.

Do not overfold here.

You actually do not wanna incorporate the meringue completely into the batter.

You wanna leave those little lumpy pieces in there.

We're using an eight-inch square cake pan.

You can use glass or metal, it doesn't really matter.

Give it some spray and then line it with a piece of parchment that overhangs two of the sides.

This we'll use later as a sling to lift the cake out.

Want to pour this right into the middle of the pan.

I'm gonna use a spatula to help prevent too much splashing.

Look at those lovely clumps of meringue floating on the top there.

Does anything look like a disaster more than this?

The oven is at 325 degrees.

We'll put this in and bake it for about 45 to 50 minutes.

And then when we take it out of the oven, we're going to put the pan on a wire rack and "accidentally" forget all about it and let it cool completely in the pan.

♪ ♪ Here is our cake.

You can see it's kind of gnarly looking on top and it sunk down a little bit, which is completely what it was supposed to do.

So now we will loosen the sides, go around the back of the parchment, and then along all four of the sides.

And then this is where the sling comes in handy.

Just going to use it to lift it the whole thing up, transfer it over to a cutting area.

And then use a large offset, get right down against the paper, Slide it underneath almost to the end and slide the paper out.

Okay, now, this is completely cool, so it's nice and firm.

Ooh, it's cushy on top.

(laughs( Let's go ahead and slice this before we dust with sugar.

So we'll slice it into threes this way.

And then we'll slice it into thirds this way as well.

Do a little dusting.

Now, for the big reveal.

Let's take a little corner piece back here and let's see how this looks.

The bottom layer is sort of firm and flan-like.

The middle layer is a more creamy pudding-like texture.

And then the top layer is this jumble of cakey meringue, and they fuse into one distinct cake that looks incredibly gorgeous when you cut into it.

Now, I'm not gonna say that all these baking mistakes are gonna give you the same results with other recipes, but with this recipe, it does add up to something pretty magical.

Mm.

It's creamy, it's flan-like.

It tastes like brown butter and brown sugar and vanilla.

That butterscotchy vanilla really comes through really nicely.

Now, there are a lot of rules in baking and technique, and this breaks almost every single one of them.

This is Milk Street's gâteau magique, A.K.A.

Magic cake.

A cake full of intentional mistakes that end up in a beautiful triple layer wonder.

- Hi, Milk Street.

I'm Regula Ysewijn and welcome here in my kitchen in Belgium.

We are going to make Christmas pudding.

And you'd say that you were in Belgium, but I am absolutely in love with everything British and British food especially.

So we've got raisins and currants here, candied peel, and then we've got our spices.

Some bread crumbs go in.

Flour-- you only need 75 grams of it.

Then there is another important ingredient that we need to add, and that is shredded suet.

And shredded suet is basically kidney fat, but it's still hard to get if you're not in the U.K.

So I found out that I can use coconut fat and then just use a butter curler to create these little chunks.

Now we just need to add our last bit of fruit, which is an apple.

So what we now need to do is add in the liquids, which are three eggs, brandy, and the beer.

Now, if I was in the U.K., I would use stout beer.

I don't have stout here.

I'm in Belgium and you're someplace else.

So I use the nearest I can get, which is the darkest beer you can get.

Look at those bubbles.

And, you know, because I'm not perfect, and it doesn't really matter that much when it comes to puddings, I forgot to put in my sugar at the start, so I'm putting it in at the end.

Well, that looks really good.

And now we can put it in our pudding basin.

You don't want an overflowing pudding.

Now we have to wrap it.

And this is my trick-- we use a towel.

And then we put our body into it like so.

Now you really have a hat.

And then use your string to go underneath that rim.

Now we just need one more bit of string.

We put it on the bottom of our pot.

There it sits nice and cozy.

So we need boiling water, which we are going to pour in all around the pudding, and then we're ready for steaming.

Be very careful.

Hot pot of water coming in.

And now we can just forget about it for four hours.

Carefully.

♪ ♪ Ooh!

I could hear it sink.

Ah... yay!

It's not Christmas without Christmas pudding.

It used to be the symbol of Christmas.

It featured on Christmas cards in Victorian times, way before the Christmas tree came in.

So that's how important it is to Christmas traditions.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ - So the holidays are approaching and you're freaking out because you don't have a good sugar cookie recipe.

Look no further.

There are a million cookie recipes out there for decorated sugar cookies, but we were never satisfied with all of the ones we tried.

So we went to work to develop a sugar cookie recipe for the holidays that not only tasted great, but was easy to work with, had a nice texture, and that you could roll out multiple times without it getting too tough.

Start out with our dry ingredients.

So all-purpose flour, of course, tiny bit of baking powder.

You want a little lift in your cookies, but you don't want them to puff up.

Of course, a tiny bit of salt and some cornstarch.

Now, cornstarch may seem a little bit odd, but what the cornstarch does here is it coats those protein strands in the flour and keeps it from getting too brittle or tough when you reroll it.

Moving on to the butter and sugar.

So we want to cream these together nicely so that they're well mixed, but we do not want to aerate it.

So we just want to cream these together on a slower speed just until they're well mixed.

(mixer whirring) So next up is the egg.

This, of course, should be room temperature as well.

It's very important.

If you put a cold egg into this butter that you worked hard to get to room temp, it's going to seize up and you're not gonna have a nice smooth dough, and you're gonna have pockets of air in your cookie.

Our dry ingredients, I'm gonna put about half in.

Just mix it really slowly.

Don't crank the machine or you're gonna have flour all over your face and all over the room.

Now that cornstarch is going to work, it's gonna keep these cookies from getting too tough.

The next ingredients I have are buttermilk and vanilla.

Now, buttermilk probably seems a little odd, but that buttermilk is acidic.

And so it's a tenderizer of the gluten in the cookie as well.

So that also is going to keep this cookie from getting too tough or brittle.

And then I'm going to slowly add the rest of the dry ingredients.

Now I'll just lightly flour the surface here, put the cookie dough out on it.

Lightly, lightly press it together so it's nice and uniform.

It's very beautiful.

Now I'll pat this into about a six-inch square and then I'll wrap this up, pop it in the fridge, and this will last a couple days.

You can keep it in the fridge until you're ready to roll out your cookies.

But you want to chill it for a couple hours at least before you roll.

Cookie dough is nice and firm.

I took it out of the refrigerator a couple minutes ago so it's not ice cold.

Now we'll roll these to about a quarter of an inch.

You want to go as evenly as you can when you're rolling cookie dough.

Make sure it's staying loose on the counter because there's nothing worse if you've rolled the whole thing out and it's totally stuck, then you can't get those cookies up off the board and you got to start all over again.

So now... cutters, cozy as they can be, right next to each other without overlapping or cutting into each other.

Get as many shapes as you can out of the first roll.

Those will be the best cookies.

If you find that the dough is sticking to your cutter, just drop it in your flour a little bit, coat the edges.

You can put them right on the sheet.

Now, when I grew up, my mom was a master cookie baker.

There was always a giant box of cookies at our house at the holidays.

There's nothing better.

That's not a better gift than that.

So I've preheated the oven at 350 degrees.

There are racks in the lower and upper third.

We'll bake both pans at the same time, but I'm going to rotate them halfway through so that they bake evenly.

These will take 14 to 16 minutes.

When the edges start to turn light golden brown, they're done.

♪ ♪ The cookies bake for about 15 minutes until they just got golden around the edge.

And then I pull them out, cool them on the pan for about ten minutes so they'll hold their shape, and then put them on a cooling rack to cool completely.

Don't ice a partially warm cookie.

It's just going to run off and make a mess.

Make sure they're nice and completely room temp.

So now for our icing, four basic ingredients here.

We have lemon juice-- that's to help flavor and also help harden the icing.

Some egg white-- you can use pasteurized egg white if you like, or fresh egg whites work as well.

And some vanilla for flavoring.

Now, the very, very important part here is to sift the powdered sugar.

Depending on where you live in the country, powdered sugar can get clumpy.

I'm here in the Northeast in Boston, and there's a lot of humidity.

So you open a package of powdered sugar, and sometimes there's a lot of clumps in there.

It's just a humidity in the air.

So you want to get rid of all that so that you have a good shot at a nice, smooth icing.

I'm going to start without the vanilla because I want a pure white, I want a nice white icing for my snowflakes.

If you wanna use a white icing and you want flavoring, use an extract like an orange extract or even a white vanilla.

They do make white vanilla.

So right into the bowl of powdered sugar, three tablespoons of egg whites, some lemon juice.

So because I'm saving some of that vanilla for a different cookie, I'm gonna add a little bit of water to the white icing here just to get it fluid.

Just add it by about quarter teaspoon at a time so you don't make it too thin.

So this is looking pretty good.

When I lift a little out and drizzle it on the top, in about ten seconds, it's settling back down into the surface.

Now, I'm going to set half of this aside for my snowflakes.

So this batch I'm going to color green.

I am going to add a little bit of vanilla here.

So this is probably going to thin it out a tiny bit more.

All right, now for coloring, I love these gel colors.

The nice thing about the gel colors is they will color your icing but will not dilute it.

You're not adding a bunch more liquid to it since you've got it the perfect consistency, I'll just grab the cookie by the edge.

This is, see a nice thick cookie about a quarter-inch thick, so you can hold onto it, just evenly kind of dip it, Let some of that excess run off.

And now my favorite tool for cookie decorating, toothpick.

If you've got any edges at all that are not coated in the icing, you can just coax it around and it's fluid enough to move where you want it to and that icing is thick enough that it's not going to run over the sides.

So now while these are still a little wet, you can decorate away.

Sprinkles are the king of holiday cookie decorating.

Now if you are feeling adventurous and you want to do something cool, I love to do this to marble icing on cookies.

So I did this with one of the trees.

So I'll just take a little bit of the gel color, the blue, and just drop... drops of it into the top of the white.

Now with my trusty old toothpick, I'm just going to swirl it around.

Until you like what you see.

Dip it.

You can let it sit right on the surface.

Make sure it's coated in the icing.

That looks pretty cool.

So if you are on the hunt for the perfect sugar cookie recipe for decorating every year, this is the one you want.

It's soft and chewy and delicious.

It doesn't get rock hard and it's not tough.

Buttermilk and cornstarch, that's the key.

♪ ♪ You can get this recipe and all the recipes from this season at MilkStreetTV.com - Recipes and episodes from this season of Milk Street are available at MilkStreetTV.com, along with shopping lists, printer-ready recipes, and our tips and techniques library.

Access our content anytime to change the way you cook.

- The season ten Milk Street Cookbook is now available, and includes every recipe from our TV show, from Brazilian cheese puffs and French toast, to skillet lasagna and Japanese cheesecake.

The new Milk Street Cookbook offers bolder, fresher, simpler recipes.

Order your copy of the Milk Street Cookbook for $34.95, 40% less than the cover price.

Call 855-MILK-177, or order online.

- Funding for this series was provided by the following.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪