Home Run Biscuits

Fox in the Snow Biscuits.

It’s okay if you stop right here and admire this picture for awhile.

If you’re from Columbus, Ohio, you know that after visiting the garage-turned-gourmet-cafe called Fox in the Snow on 4th Street in Italian Village, your life will be changed. Seriously. It’s the most incredible place I’ve ever been. It’s everything I can aspire to own one day!

Fox in the Snow Photo from ABC6.

I dream (daily) about the industrial-yet-rustic atmosphere monogrammed with the world-famous fox logo; about the natural light beaming in through the ivy vines along the glass garage door panels; about the wood grain tables and personal pourover coffee pots; about the windows above the counter where you can set up your laptop and let the background be the ballet of bakers working on the most decadent pastries you’ve ever eaten.

Then there’s the pastries. The pastries! The pastries that greet you from the hallway entrance behind clean glass panels and force you into choosing one for that day—but it usually results in two or three because the choice is nearly impossible. And then there’s the biscuits.

Fox in the Snow pastry case, Summer 2019. That’s not my arm reaching for that Blueberry Galette, but it very well could be.

Truth be told, I’ve never had a Fox in the Snow biscuit. Until the pandemic, I didn’t even know that was a menu item (I’m always blinded by the stunning blueberry galettes, like above!). However, with a brilliant marketing strategy and an effort to keep people baking while quarantined, Fox in the Snow released their official biscuit recipe for us to try at home, along with this incredible video from one of the owners.

I’ve wanted to try these biscuits for the past 8 weeks of quarantine, but haven't because I’ve needed to ration my butter and flour to use for customers’ orders. Then I was going to make my mom a Mother’s Day cake, but seeing as we still had approximately 8.2 pounds of my graduation cake left, we didn’t need more. So, finally I had a reason to make these beauties!

Here’s how it went:

I woke up unintentionally around 6:30am on Sunday, because apparently that’s how the day was going to go. What else would I do besides make biscuits?

I snuck upstairs, brewed myself a cup of coffee which I had to put in my Fox in the Snow mug, and pretended I was drinking a vanilla latte made by a barista instead of French vanilla black coffee made by my Keurig. Sigh.

Then I made some dough, following their recipe to the T with big chunks of butter and just enough sugar to bring a subtle sweetness throughout the flaky layers.

When it came to cutting the biscuits, I chose my medium biscuit cutter and got 12 rounds out of the dough (as opposed to their 8, oops!).

An interesting instruction from the recipe is to not twist the biscuit cutter at the bottom of the cut. You push straight down and lift straight up. That gives the biscuits a clean edge and a flat bottom to set on the baking pan.

But that clean edge doesn’t really matter when you brush on the egg wash. This isn’t just any egg wash, either. The addition of heavy cream in this pre-bake glaze makes such a smooth and velvety wash…you’ll just want to drown them in it.

Pro tip: Don’t drown them. Because then the excess wash will settle on your baking pan and it'll make your oven and entire kitchen smell like burning scrambled eggs.

Here they are out of the oven. I could admit that they’re leaning, or I could just use the industry go-to term, “rustic,” to excuse their uneven and misshaped form. So we have rustic biscuits now!

I’m guessing the lean resulted from the dough being cut too thick, and then when they rose in the oven, they got a little top-heavy and, well, toppled. However, this didn’t affect the taste one bit! If anything, it gave a perfect visual to see each flaky layer between the crisp bottom and the golden brown top.

In fact, after I brushed on the honey butter and topped it with some turbinado sugar (the recipe calls for salt, but I’m a sweet fan myself! I also have 176oz of Turbinado that I didn’t order, so I’m using it in literally everything), we cancelled breakfast.

Please notice the fruit bouquet I made at 7am on Mother’s Day because my mom’s gift didn’t come in the mail in time. When all else fails, see what you can do with what’s in your fridge!

Have you ever taken snacks to a group of kids and been straight-up mobbed? Well, that’s what happened when I took these biscuits out of the oven. My parents came running. They begged “can we pleeeease have one before church while they’re hot?” Obviously I allowed it, because I wanted one too.

They were so good that we each had one, watched a 60-minute church service, and decided we didn’t need my dad’s famous Mother’s Day breakfast. Usually nothing comes between us and his Sunday morning pan-fried sausage, hash browns, and scrambled eggs; but when there’s hot Fox in the Snow biscuits, nothing else matters.

If you’re wondering why this post is called “Home Run Biscuits,” it’s because as my mom was leaving the kitchen, one bite into a warm biscuit, she yelled from the hall “home run!” I’ll take it.

The last thing I’d advise you to do, though these would be good hot off the baking sheet or with some butter slabbed across the top, is to make some strawberry jam.

I have no idea how to make jam. The only thing I know about canning comes from watching those apocalypse prep reality shows that feature people who live in underground bomb shelters with 42 years’ worth of home-canned food.

However, I do know how to cut up some strawberries, throw them in a pot with sugar and lemon juice, and let it simmer until its super thick and syrupy and good enough to eat with a spoon. So that’s what I did.

Take that spoonful of jam, carefully break apart one of the dozens of layers of your biscuit, and generously (liberally) spoon it over the top. WOW.

That’s all it is!

For my Columbus friends, do yourself a favor and drive to Fox in the Snow (they have multiple locations!) and BUY EVERYTHING. Please think of me while you’re there! Also please tell them to open an Atlanta location.

For everyone else, do yourself a different favor and MAKE THESE BISCUITS! They’re simple, fun, and oh-so-delicious. Put them up on Instagram, tag @foxinthesnowcafe, and they’ll repost your creation!

This isn’t affiliated with or sponsored by the cafe, however I just love it so much I wrote a whole post about it, and I think you’ll love it too.

Enjoy, Biscuit Lovers!

jorie

It's Macaron Monday!

Are Macaron Monday’s a thing in the baking world?

I’m not sure, because the truth is, I’ve always been too intimidated to make them! The precision required to weigh, sift, fold, pipe, bake, and assemble the little French meringue cookies scared me off…and I’ve owned a home bakery for ten years!

Because of this extended social distancing time, I decided to give macarons a shot since I’m not filling orders and have time for a little R&D. Let’s be honest, baking research and development trumps all other industries. I get to look through Pinterest, browse other blogs, take mouth-watering pictures—and it usually ends with a taste test.

For my first bake with macarons, I wanted to try a standard, vanilla recipe that would give good feedback and had clear instructions. You can find the whole thing here at one of my favorite blogs, Preppy Kitchen. I read through his tips and committed them to memory, and then just started baking.

You’ll need a few special ingredients for macarons, namely almond flour. I’ve never worked with almond flour, but it needs sifted. A lot. And then you need to throw away all of the parts that are too big for the sifter so they don’t impede your delicate meringue.

Oh, and the vodka. Like I said, this is strictly for R&D (wink), so I used the vodka to wipe down my mixing bowl and attachment to sterilize them and rid them of any excess oil that may deflate my meringue. But, if you find any secondary uses for the leftover vodka, by all means, continue that R&D! And please let me know how that goes.

I’ve also never baked with a scale before—I know, shocking. But I decided to put my new scale to use, since macarons have an incredibly low margin for error. Measuring in grams (as opposed to cups, ounces, etc.) really isn’t that difficult and there wasn’t as big of a learning curve as I expected.

Next came the actual making of the batter, or macronage, which, from what I gather, is a fancy word for stirring. It requires patience, attention, and some arm muscles (no seriously, folding 40-50 times really works your upper body!). The most important part of the mixing, once you get stiff peaks in your meringue, is folding. Fold, fold, and fold those dry ingredients some more until you get “figure 8 ribbons” in your batter.

Figure what? That’s about the most vague description I’ve ever heard. But this video from Sugar Geek helped me see that, yes, you actually do fold until your batter can make a continuous figure 8. So that’s what I did!

Then I filled my piping bag and piped 1-inch circles all over my parchment paper that I stuck down with some batter. I wasn’t sure how much the meringue would spread in the oven, so I spaced them out a good bit. After you pipe them, you let them rest until they set up and are firm to the touch.

The 40-minute resting time went pretty quick, because we had a family Zoom call to distract me!

Sorry, you probably don’t care about that. But I do! So that’s why I put in on here. Because it’s my blog and I do what I want (kidding, sort of).

Back to the Macs:

Here they’ve rested and are ready for the oven. The resting period lets them rise up in the oven instead of spreading out, or so I’ve been told.

And that’s exactly what they did! *silently fist pumps alone in my kitchen.

I put nonpareil rainbow sprinkles on half of them, just to further my R&D work. And because I love them.

Okay, the hard part is done! All that I did after celebrating their seamless baking process was whip up a batch of my favorite vanilla buttercream, threw it in a piping bag, and piped a circle onto the bottom of half of the cookies, then topped them off with the other half of the batch.

Well, then I rolled some in sprinkles, because like I said earlier, I can. And I love sprinkles.

To answer your question, yes, I did get a little heavy-handed with the buttercream. But again, buttercream is my favorite part of any dessert, and I made these macarons for myself. Therefore, I put lots of buttercream in them.

Now we’re done!

Except, don’t eat them. At least not for another day or two after they sit in the fridge. Supposedly the flavors develop to give you a cohesive Mac, but clearly I couldn’t wait, so I took a bite. But I needed a good picture (see above), so someone had to do it.

Best of luck with your own Mac bakes, and be sure to let me know how it goes! I promise, it’s not as scary as it looks.

If I can do it, you can too!

xoxo,

jorie