It is with some modest authority that I claim to know a good deal about making biscuits.
Every Christmas for nearly thirty years I mix and bake and pack and give (and eat) multiple batches of these little seasonal specialities.
Most home-made biscuits are not much good, to be honest. Very often I have been told that someone makes great biscuits, and when you taste them they nearly always turn out to be a bland shortbread with a taste of slightly scorched flour and nothing else.
I would have to say that scorching is by far the commonest fault, and the reason for this is very readily understood: biscuits are small and usually thin, they contain very scorchable ingredients like sugar and butter, and a lot of recipes give temperatures that are too high and cooking times that are too long.
So the first secret of successful biscuiteering is to exercise great caution with baking: test the first trayful with a slightly reduced temperature, with several minutes chopped off the time allowed. Get yourself a good kitchen timer and always use it. Make notes of your findings, modify the recipes as required, and keep these notes for future use.
The best way to bake biscuits is on parchment paper. They may stick to the bare metal of a biscuit tray - even if they do not, sometimes a taste will come through from some long-ago pizza: I repeat, biscuits are very thin!
Have several FLAT baking trays and line them with non-stick parchment; don't use such things as roasting tins or swiss roll tins - the raised edges deflect heat unevenly around the biscuits and give irregular results. If such tins are all you have, turn them over and use the underside, covered with paper as before. Greaseproof can be used but the dough is more likely to stick to it, and then the biscuits break as you remove them to the cooling rack. And they must be removed to a cooling rack promptly in most cases, or the residual heat of the metal tray may bake them further and yes, scorch them!
Whenever you propose to make biscuits, start by placing the oven racks as needed - usually near the centre - and turn the oven on, and while it heats, line your biscuit trays with baking parchment and lay out your cooling racks and timer and a spatula for moving them about, and a tin or box to take the finished product.
THEN you can mix your dough, if it is the kind that can be done straight away.
Of course many biscuit doughs are rich in butter and need to be chilled after mixing, in which case you prepare the mixture, wrap and refrigerate for at least half an hour: when ready to bake them proceed as above.
More to follow...
