Ice Cream Biscuits - Just two "ingredients"

Yes, I mean to put ingredients in quotes, because the two ingredients are not actually single-ingredient items. But still, when you're mixing this up, you only need two things.

Easy peasy.

This concept came about when someone asked about ice cream bread, which seems to be making the rounds on blogs lately.

I hadn't paid attention to them as they wandered across blogs, but when it was explained that ice cream bread is a quick bread or muffin that's made with ice cream and self-rising flour, my very next thought was "biscuits!!!"

Thanks to Nathalie Dupree's book Southern Biscuits, I knew that biscuits didn't have to be made with butter. I'd made cream biscuits and yogurt biscuits with her recipes.

So, why not ice cream biscuits? Yes, why not, indeed.

So I scurried to the kitchen and whipped up a batch.

I figured they'd be a little bit sweet, so they'd be perfect for the biscuit version of strawberry shortcake.

What surprised me was how high they rose. They also took a little extra longer to bake than normal biscuits because the ice cream was so cold.

They were a little sweet, but not crazy sweet, and they were crunchy on the outside and soft inside. Nice for strawberry shortcake, for sure.

I used a peach ice cream I made recently, because I thought the fruity flavor would be good in the biscuits. Use whatever flavor you like.

Ice Cream Biscuits

1 cup ice cream
2 cups (9 ounces)  self-rising flour
Butter (for the tops of the biscuits - optional)

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees and line a baking sheet with parchment paper.

Let the ice cream get soft while you're waiting for the oven to heat. It doesn't need to be completely melted, but it shouldn't be chunky, either.

Put the self-rising flour in a bowl and add the ice cream. Stir until all the flour is moistened. If the dough seems dry, add a little milk or cream. If the dough seems too soft, don't worry about it.

Flour your work surface - you can us self-rising flour or all purpose. Turn out the dough and shape it into a rough square. Flour the top of the dough, and roll to about 8x10 inches. You don't need to measure. Eyeball it and imagine something a little smaller than standard sheet of paper.

Fold the dough in thirds, like a letter. Roll again to the same size (use flour as needed to keep the dough from sticking to the counter or the roller) and fold again. Roll and fold one more time.

This time, roll to the dough to about 5x10 inches. Use a 3-inch biscuit cutter to cut three rounds from the dough. I used a fluted cutter, but a regular round one is fine.

Gather the scraps, taking care to keep the layers you've created in the dough horizontal. Roll and cut more biscuits. I got two from this reroll, then gathered and rerolled again to get one last biscuit for a total of six.

Put the biscuits on the baking sheet. Brush with butter (or milk, if you like) and bake at 425 degrees until the biscuits are nicely browned, about 18 minutes, depending on how cold the dough was when it went into the oven.

When the biscuits come out of the oven, you can brush them with a little more butter, if you like.

Let the biscuits cool on a rack.

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