I'm Not a Baker and Even I Can Make These Buttery Biscuits

I’m the world’s biggest fan of hyperbole. But I promise that I’m not exaggerating when I tell you that last weekend was the first time I had baked something in about a decade. I’m not a baker. I don’t bake. I’ve never had any desire to follow recipes to a T or learn the difference between baking soda and baking powder. I prefer to use recipes as guidelines rather than mathematical, dogmatic blueprints, and you can’t do that when you bake.

But last week senior food editor Molly Baz challenged me to bake something. She had just developed a recipe for Basically Strawberry Shortcakes and she assured me that even I—a notorious non-baker—could absolutely make the biscuits in question. I am competitive and proud (not to mention, I trust Molly), so for the first time in a decade, I decided to bake something.

I could give you an intense play-by-play of how to make these tender, light shortcakes, but you could just scroll through the recipe for that. So instead, I’m going to cut to the chase and tell you that it worked. I made the biscuits, and guess what? I will probably make them again. How did my transformation happen in such a short time?

First off, it was only possible because this recipe is so casual and straightforward, with no fancy equipment or elaborate components involved. You use one bowl; you incorporate the cold butter with your hands; and you knead and fold your dough minimally. You don't even need a biscuit cutter or a rolling pin or a bench scraper—just a bowl and a lightly-floured work surface.

Next, the recipe is as simple as possible, with no extraneous fluff—every ingredient and step is there for a reason. From the time I started mixing ingredients to the time I set them in the freezer to chill before baking, it took me 20 minutes. The most "complicated step" (quotation marks because it's easy) is quartering the dough, then stacking it in a tower and pressing it back into a thinner slab. It's critical for creating the layers of butter and flour that make the biscuits so flaky and tall.

And lastly, I was motivated to bake because I had tasted the biscuits in the test kitchen and I knew them to be extraordinarily delicious. Let's be real: Why bother baking if it's not going to be something better than anything you could buy at the store? This recipe will produce the kind of incredibly satisfying biscuit that you can peel back cleanly, later by layer, to reveal a tender, buttery interior. And the exterior is just as nice. Deeply browned with nooks and crannies that crisp and crunch.

I’m sure there are some non-bakers out there that need to hear this: You can bake things every once in a while. And you might even enjoy the process. These biscuits were the best thing I’ve baked in a decade. They were also the only thing—but trust me on this: These are something special.

Get that recipe right here:

Basically Strawberry Shortcakes

Originally Appeared on Bon Appétit