Snickerdoodle Skillet Biscuits

Snickerdoodle Skillet Biscuits - made May 6, 2017 from Coupon Clipping Cook

This recipe for snickerdoodle skillet biscuits seemed right up my alley. It uses my cast iron skillet, my Penzey’s Vietnamese cinnamon and it’s a bread product. No fail, right? Well, sort of.

Don’t get me wrong; the concept is amazing. I like biscuits, I like cinnamon sugar, I like bread products baked in my cast iron skillet. This was good but I don’t know if I would call it great. And for that, we can blame my inability to make light and fluffy biscuits probably more than the recipe. I’m always (overly) mindful of not overhandling biscuit dough or else you risk developing the gluten, warming up the butter and not getting light-as-air biscuits.

Which means I try to handle the dough as little as possible. Which turned out to be the default for this dough because it was way too sticky and wet for me to get a decent handle on it. The flouring and rolling out part of the directions took a nose dive as I would’ve had to add another cup of flour just to get this to not stick to every surface including my hands. I did the best I could but the dough stuck to everything and I ended up shaping the dough rather than cutting it out.

I don’t know if it was that amount of handling or just that I’m cursed by the baking gods but these biscuits came out just okay. The outer part was good because it developed into a nice sweet crunch from the cinnamon sugar coating and baking in the skillet. But I wouldn’t say the insides were fluffy-soft like a good biscuit. It was simply bready. And these were only good warm. After they had cooled, the cinnamon sugar coating became moist and the outsides lost their crunch. So this is another recipe where it’s best made when you’re going to serve it soon after it’s out of the oven.

2 cups plus 2 tablespoons flour

1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
3/4 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon sugar
1 teaspoon cream of tartar
3/4 cup milk
1 egg
1/3 cup butter, chilled and cut into small cubes

Topping
1/4 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

1. Preheat oven to 450 degrees F. Grease 8" cast iron skillet with 1 teaspoon butter and set aside.
2. In a large bowl, add the flour, baking powder, salt, milk, sugar, cream of tartar, egg and cubed butter. With a pastry cutter or two knives, cut the butter into the dry ingredients. 
3. Add beaten egg and milk, mixing the ingredients with a fork until dough forms.
4. Sprinkle a light coating of flour on a large cutting board and add the dough. Knead the dough a few times until texture becomes sturdy enough to roll. Add a light coating of flour to a rolling pin and roll out the dough to 1 1/4" thick. Using a 3"-wide biscuit or cookie cutter, cut the dough into 4 large biscuits.
5. In a small bowl, mix together the cinnamon and sugar. Coat all sides of a biscuit with the cinnamon sugar mixture and lay it in the skillet. Repeat for the with remaining 3 biscuits so that each biscuit is leaning against one another.
6. Bake until the biscuits turn a light golden color, about 16 minutes. Remove from oven and serve while hot, topped with butter.