Cream Cheese Biscuits

If you are hosting a New Year's party and will have guests the following morning then this is an easy biscuit recipe.  These are not your traditional fluffy biscuits.  They end up almost like a shortbread cookie and taste wonderful with a flavored honey or as a side to a delicious fruit salad.  No pictures, sorry.  I made these a couple weeks ago and didn't take any pictures.

Here is what you need:

1 cup flour

1/4 tsp salt

1 tsp baking powder

1 tbsp sugar

3 oz cream cheese

1 stick of melted butter

Here is what you do:

Combine your flour, salt, baking powder and sugar in a medium bowl.  Use a pastry cutter (get one if you don't have one, they are like $3 and make you look like you know what you're doing in the kitchen) to cut  the cream cheese into the flour.  You want the consistency to be like small green peas in the flour.  Pockets of flavor baby!!  Then pour in your melted butter and stir it until combined.  Don't be alarmed at the greasy buttery mess of goodness in your bowl.  

Lightly flour your surface (cutting board, marble counter top, formica...whatevs you got) and roll out the dough until it's probably 1/4 inch thick.  Then take your biscuit cutter (if you don't have a biscuit cutter use a tiny jar like olives come in or something) and cut out your little biscuits.  You can do tiny ones or bigger ones.  I cut mine out to be about 2 inches across since these are so rich.  A tip to keep the dough from sticking to the cutter is to flour the cutter as well.  It's pretty annoying when your biscuit is stuck in your jar...like REALLY annoying.  If you've never made biscuits before please know that the leftover dough after the first cutting can be softly put back together and cut more biscuits out of it.  Don't waste the dough or you can eat it raw...I may have done that.

Place the biscuits in a lightly greased dish and bake at 400 degrees for approximately 12 minutes.  Watch them and when they start to look golden remove them.  They will not fluff up like normal biscuits.  They will be pretty firm little biscuits.  

Supposedly if you use a cutter of 1 1/2 inches you will end up with 3 dozen biscuits.  I ended up with probably a dozen biscuits so if you have a lot of people double this recipe.

I may use this recipe instead of shortbread for strawberry shortbread, that's the consistency they come out as.  mmmmm I can just taste them soaked in sugary strawberry juices!

Enjoy!!

~ This recipe came from the wonderful cookbook Ambrosia out of Vicksburg, Mississippi.