Labor Day weekend has come and gone, and you know, I honestly have no idea what people usually do on Labor Day weekend (buy mattresses at low, low prices, maybe?). I went hiking to Wallace Falls outside of Seattle, and it was beautiful. And also crowded. So I guess what people usually do on Labor Day weekend is hike Wallace Falls. Hmmm…

After the hike, I was completely drained of all energy, and what I could have used was a biscuit. An outrageously buttery biscuit full of carbs and energy and how was that for a segue?

Now, I’m pretty sure it’s a legal requirement to be way into buttermilk biscuits if you were born and raised in the South. But in my two-plus decades in Texas, I had never met anyone who made biscuits from scratch. It seemed like everyone I knew just bought the canned Pillsbury version instead, claiming that proper biscuits are too difficult to make. They talked about having to freeze the dough at random points, or brush layers with butter, or keep the mixing bowls and whatnot in the fridge so it’d all stay cold — what?

No, no, no! You don’t have to do any of that nonsense. Buttermilk biscuits are supposed to be easy. Yes, it’s true that a certain component of it does have to be quite cold — the butter, so that it will stay in solid little flecks throughout the dough, which will then melt and release steam while baking to produce that irresistible flaky texture of buttermilk biscuits. But everything else? Who cares. If you find an especially fussy recipe for biscuits, you’ve found a recipe that misses the whole point of them.

This particular biscuit recipe is for malted barley biscuits, but I didn’t really feel compelled to buy barley I’d barely use (heh heh heh), so instead I just subbed in honey. That doesn’t make these as sweet as true honey buttermilk biscuits, but it does create the fluffiest, butteriest, traditional buttermilk biscuits that goes excellently with jam, marmalade, or if you’re especially daring, even more butter.