Normally when I make biscuits, they’re simple baking powder biscuits with nothing but flour, shortening, milk, baking powder, salt, and if they’re being used for strawberry shortcakes, a little sugar. That recipe has a buttermilk variation, but I decided to use a recipe from Live Well Bake Often instead because it uses butter instead of shortening, and I have plenty of butter.

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According to this recipe the key to tall, flaky biscuits is to keep the butter and buttermilk as cold as possible, something I attempted to do, but a number of factors ultimately got in the way of my achieving maximum biscuit height. The butter gets cut in after mixing the dry ingredients (flour, sugar, salt*, baking powder, and baking soda*) and then the buttermilk is mixed in. Cutting the butter in with a fork rather than a pastry blender or food processor likely gave the butter too much time to warm up.

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Then, the dough is folded a few times, patted into a flat rectangle, and cut into circles. The recipe says not to twist the biscuit cutter to prevent the edges from becoming sealed, but since I used a floured jar, I didn’t get as clean of a cut as I would with a sharp metal cutter. I brushed the tops with buttermilk before baking, but realized I had set the pan over the hot oven while I was cutting the biscuits, which again warmed the butter. And while I attempted to get my measurements as close as possible to those in the recipe, instead of a dozen biscuits, I ended up with sixteen.

So for a number of reasons, my biscuits were not as tall as they were supposed to be. But I am used to short biscuits and they are still light and flaky, so that’s fine with me.

After baking, I brushed the tops with butter, and ate a couple with some Christmas Jam (a blend of strawberry and cranberry) my sister sent me (along with six other jars of jam and a ceramic bear) from a trip to the Great Smoky Mountains.

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*store-bought items