Several years ago a publicist sent me Gale Gand’s Short and Sweet, a dessert cookbook with quick and easy recipes with 8 ingredients or less. As easy as that sounds, most of the recipes demand much more time than the 15, 30 or 45 minutes that the book is arranged by. And the ingredient lists sound simple, but I don’t know too many people who wouldn’t have to go shopping to gather most of these ingredients.
One example is the chocolate croissant bread pudding I made once (first time I’m posting it). It was easy enough, but who has 2 cups of cream and 2 cups of half and half in their frig?
This stuff is awesome by the way, just realize you might wind up eating 6 croissiants, 4 cups of cream and half and half, a cup of sugar, 6 eggs and almost a half pound of chocolate in one sitting. We won’t even mention the ice cream.
Over the years I’ve attempted to make the Killer Buttermilk Biscuits from the book. But I’m an idiot and never follow the recipe so I wind up with flat lifeless biscuits. I substitute milk, I throw other stuff in or I don’t follow the procedure. But (probably for the first time ever) I had some buttermilk in my frig, so I followed the recipe to the letter. They turned out very good. Here they are with some spicy gravy which I’ve done before.
Then I made them a few days later and they were awesome, I didn’t even wait to photograph them.
What was the difference? The first time I made them too small- instead of filling one 9 inch pie pan, they filled one and a half pans. And the glass pie plate didn’t brown the bottoms as well as I’d like. The second time a made big biscuits that all fit in a metal pie plate and they became beautifully golden, tall and fluffy. I’m sorry I didn’t take a picture, because they would have been prettier than the ones in the book but I have a feeling I’ll make these again, since I’ve perfected them.