Baking is hard.

I’m from Alabama. You’d think that I’d be able to make one of the most defining foods of the South–the biscuit. My grandmother pats hers out by hand, and they always turn out so tender and buttery and good.

A good word to describe my biscuits would be “brick,” as in, “Wow, Pam’s biscuits are harder than a barrel of brick anvils.”

They’re only hard on top, mind you; they taste great on the inside. But biscuits shouldn’t have a crunchy top.

I suspect that it’s my flour–I’m mixing too much, and it’s screwing with the gluten and hardening the product. Could also be that I’m not the greatest at cutting butter into flour; it’d be so much easier if I could bring the butter to room temperature first, but from what I understand, that’s a definite no-no.

My grandmother has no recipe for biscuits; she just knows what she needs. She doesn’t measure. She flours her work surface and her hands, mixes her ingredients, and bakes them–without the use of a biscuit cutter. Her hands are always lovely afterward, caked with drying dough, so well-worn and used.

When I was little, my sister and I would spend the summers with her. She’d wake up before the sun rose and start patting out biscuits, and eventually my sister and I would rise, too, to sleepily sit on counters in the kitchen and wait on the biscuits to finish cooking. Sometimes, we’d get Maw-Maw to fix us a plate of jelly cut with butter–now that I look at it, I realize that my heart must hate me, but it’s ridiculously good on a hot biscuit. The best, though, was to just crack the biscuit open and put a pat of butter inside, then replace the top and wait for the butter to melt.

Life, I think, doesn’t get much better than eating a hot, buttered biscuit early in the morning around a crumb-covered table, roosters crowing outside.