by Real Richmond Dad, Jeb Hoge 
There is one activity that, above all others, gets my six-year-old fired up. In fact, the mere mention of one word sets his eyes shining and mind racing.
BISCUITS .
“Wait, what? Biscuits?” I hear you thinking. You read it right.
In all honesty, I think it’s the perfect father/son activity for us. I can accomplish so much in the thirty minutes or so that we spend preparing a batch of buttermilk biscuits. I can teach responsibility (“Always remember to check the oven to make sure it’s off.” “Don’t eat all the dough or we won’t have any left to bake.”). I can teach math (“If we’re making a double recipe, then we need two teaspoons of baking powder, plus two more. How many teaspoons is that all together?”). I can teach patience (“The biscuits need five more minutes…”). I can teach that making a mess can be fun, but cleaning up is part of the job (a part that we’re still working on). And most of all, I can teach the idea that love comes from doing something good for someone else. Interestingly, though, I haven’t really had to teach that…he figured that out on his own.
So what goes down on a biscuit morning? Usually I’ll have the necessary ingredients and tools already arranged on the counter along with the big cutting board. I set the oven to 450 degrees as we put our aprons on. We’ve got our own aprons: mine has Star Wars characters, his has steam engines, and his little brother’s also has a train (very personal, our aprons). He fetches his stepstool and we wash our hands. Once we’re all ready, I have him count the scoops and spoonfuls of dry ingredients as I empty them into the bowl. (This is for a single batch; we often double it.)
1 cup all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
¼ teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon baking soda
With an odd kitchen tool (seriously, I have no idea what it is), I let my son mix up the dry ingredients. This is a careful effort; he’s learned that otherwise the mix can hop out of the bowl and make a mess. Next, we count out and cut the 2-1/2 tablespoons of butter (or shortening, but butter is better). I chop it up and work it into the mix. After that, it’s my son’s favorite part: the buttermilk. We measure out ½ cup and he pours it into the bowl. I flour up a spoon and stir it, and we talk about how the buttermilk combines with the other ingredients to get all gooey and sticky, and wonder why. Someday I’ll get Alton Brown to explain.
After mixing the buttermilk in and working the dough into a ball, I flour the cutting board and plop the ball in the middle. A little bit of kneading and then out comes the rolling pin! I flour it and start to work the ball out. Then, like a instructor pilot passing over the controls, I let my son take the pin and flatten the dough for a couple of minutes. Once we get it into ½” thickness, I get out a juice glass (since we don’t have a proper biscuit cutter) and flour the rim, then he and I take turns cutting out circles of dough and putting them on a baking sheet. He sneaks a bite or two of raw dough against my wishes, but then again, so do I, and eventually the dough is gone. He stands back as I slide the sheet into the oven and set the timer to 11 minutes. After that, he might hang around a minute to help clean up, but being six, his Saturday mornings usually have things in store, so off he goes while I clean up (I can already hear my wife thinking “…mostly.”)
By the time the biscuits are done, both of the kids and usually the dog are at the table ready to eat, so we get glasses of milk, the butter dish, and whatever jam we have, and dig in. Usually, if it’s just a single recipe, the biscuits are gone by the end of breakfast, but that just gives me more reason to double or even triple the recipe so we have more for later and we can work on those math skills, too.
It’s fun, it’s easy, and for me, it’s a way to continue an activity that my mother did with me when I was a little boy. In fact, thanks to her teaching me how to make biscuits, I won first prize in a baking contest in second grade. Our biscuit recipe comes from a cookbook (“Miss Daisy Celebrates Tennessee” by Daisy King) that my fifth-grade teacher gave me many years ago. Before long, I’ll probably introduce my second son to the recipe, and then in a few years, my third son will be ready to give it a try, too. And someday, if I’m lucky, their kids will make biscuits for all of us to enjoy together.
