Pop Biscuits, filled with honey-butter

Thoughts:

This whimsical snack, at first blush, seemed wonderfully simple to put together. I blithely made a batch of biscuits, filled them with honey, and baked. They were not a success.

In addition to my wandering away from the oven for a bit too long, leaving the biscuits to brown, the honey soaked into the dough, leaving sweetened little hollows on the inside of the biscuits. Not cool. So a few days later, I tried another approach. This time, I baked the biscuits, and filled them after they were cooled.

This produced the winningest of successes. The biscuits are filled with these wonderful blobs of honey-butter, and when you bite into them, it does, in fact, almost pop. Each bite is sweet, but not overpowering, wonderfully portable, stealable, and all around scoffable.

Recipe for Pop Biscuits

Cook’s Notes: I tried using plain honey-butter, but found that it was not easy enough to pipe into the biscuits. The slightly more elaborate filling, below, is just right.

Ingredients for Biscuits:

• 3 cups all purpose flour
• 1 tablespoon baking powder
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 cup milk
• 1 1/2 sticks unsalted butter, cold

Ingredients for Filling:

• 1/2 stick butter, room temperature
• 2 Tbs. honey
• 1/4 cup powdered sugar
• 1 Tbs. heavy cream
• 1/2 tsp. vanilla

Preaheat oven to 350F, and line a baking sheet with parchment paper.

In a large bowl, combine the dry ingredients for the biscuits. Add the butter, and either cut in with knives or rub in until the butter resembles very small peas. Add the milk gradually, and stir thoroughly to combine. Turn out the dough onto a floured surface, and press or roll flat. Fold the dough over on itself several times and roll back out: this creates the wonderful, split-able layers in the cooked biscuits.

Roll the layered dough out to about 3/4″ thickness, and cut into rounds. Arrange these on the baking sheet, and bake for 15-20 minutes, or until the tops of the biscuits are just turning golden brown. Remove from oven and let cool.

While the biscuits are cooking, you can make the filling. Using a mixer, beat the butter and honey together until they are light and fluffy, around 2 minutes. Add the remaining ingredients, and mix. There should be no lumps of butter or powdered sugar when you are done. Transfer the filling to a pastry bag, or a ziploc with one corner snipped off. In a pinch, you can also spoon the filling into the biscuits, but piping it on is an easier, neater job.

Carefully split each biscuit open, one at a time. Pipe about 1 tsp. of the filling into the center (a bit more for larger biscuits), and replace the top exactly how it was, so as to give the illusion of a whole biscuit. Serve, and enjoy!