I like template recipes that you can flex, adapt and scale up or down. Add cheese and you get savoury. Add sugar or raisins and here comes sweet.
The flagship template is bread - really, flour and water and the airborne yeast can do its job. I can just about imagine the first bread created by leaving a bowl of milled grain out in the rain, then a bit longer still so it fermented. Then the owner of the bowl got pissed off with the flour spoiling and threw the lot into the fire, only they missed and the first ever dough landed just above the flame, perched on some stones. The smell wafting up after a short spell made everyone sit up in amazement, no doubt.
Well, I made this story up in its entirety but the road to the most elaborate culinary achievement surely led through errors and happenstance. And very good too - testing is necessary and all but it’s a bit of a drudgery compared to a flamboyant putting together random ingredients with astonishing results, only not being able to replicate the feat.
These are plain scones, or biscuits as Americans call them, and since I was inspired by King Arthur Flour, I might as well stick to ‘biscuits’. The original is a near-genius, two-ingredient dough mixing flour and cream in equal quantities. I found that a bit stiff and stodgy so I threw in cream cheese, flamboyantly, with a result.
The main recipe below has cheese in it but a couple of spoonfuls of sugar and some cinnamon will make a decent sweet version.