Orange Cranberry Tea Biscuits

Today our youngest daughter walked in the room with a tray for tea, pretend tea.  She offered it to me and asked if I would like a biscuit.  Of course I did!  And after we had our tea and biscuits, I asked if she’d ever had an actual tea biscuit before.  She had not, so I offered to make some.  I didn’t have a recipe, but I was certain I could find one.  I scoured the internet looking for tea biscuits.  Many had ingredients I don’t keep on hand, so I kept looking.  I came across one on Cooks.com called Welsh Tea Biscuits.  The recipe sounded fairly simple.  The only real problem was that I didn’t have an electric skillet or a way to determine the temperature of a skillet.  I had to change the way I’d cook them, so I decided I’d change the recipe to an orange cranberry flavor too. 

ORANGE CRANBERRY TEA BISCUITS

DOUGH 3 1/3 c. flour 1 1/2 tsp. baking powder 1 tsp. salt 1/2 tsp. baking soda 1 tsp. orange zest 1 c. butter 1 c. sugar 1 egg 1/2 c. milk 1 c. dried cranberries ICING 1/2 c. powdered sugar 1 tbsp orange juice zest of one medium orange Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Cream sugar and butter. Blend flour, salt, baking powder, soda and orange zest. Add to creamed mixture. Beat egg into milk. Add to mixture and blend. Add the cranberries. Dough will be very stiff. Pinch off portion of dough and roll on floured board to about 1/4″ thick. Use a cookie cutter and cut out biscuits. Continue until you are down to enough dough for one last biscuit.  Press this dough into the cutter and you’ve used all the dough. Bake on parchment lined cookie sheet turning biscuits so they are lightly brown on each side (about 5-8 minutes or so per side*). While baking, prepare the icing.  Mix powdered sugar, juice and zest.  Once the biscuits are finished baking remove and drizzle with icing. Allow to cool completely.  Store in an airtight container.  I juiced an entire orange by mistake, so my icing was much more like a glaze. *For larger cookies, bake about 10 minutes per side.  For smaller cookies 5-8 minutes per side is enough.

We finished baking and icing the biscuits.  They seemed a little like a cross between a shortbread and a thin scone.  They were slightly crisp on the outside of the larger biscuits.  The inside was fluffy and soft.  The smaller ones were much more like a shortbread cookie, crisp all the way through.  This is when our middle daughter decided to make some hot tea to enjoy with her tea biscuit.  She thought they were delicious.  Then the youngest got her hands on them, she wanted to share with the neighbor girls.  I was tasting each of the batches to see how long to bake them.  The darker ones reminded me more of shortbread and the lighter and less baked were more like the scone.   I thought they were great even without the icing.  My husband loved them too.

Now this is a tea biscuit not a scone, but if you want a really great scone recipe my sister has it.  She’ll be posting some recipes when she has a chance. Stay tuned for those. 🙂