2 Cups Flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
2 teaspoons sugar
1/2 teaspoon cream of tartar
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup cold butter – resist the urge to soften it. Cold butter makes biscuits flakier.
2/3 cup milk (I’ve also used 1/2+1/2 in a pinch… that is dangerously addictive)
Preheat oven to 450
Stir together flour, baking powder, sugar, cream of tartar and salt. Cut in butter until mixture resembles coarse crumbs. Make a well in the center and add milk. Stir with a fork until moistened, you can add a little extra milk if the dough doesn’t come together well. Might also have to get your hands in there to mix it up.
The less you work with biscuits, the flakier and fluffier they’ll be. SO, I use that as an excuse to make them the lazy way! I just dump my dough out onto the baking sheet I’m planning to use and press it into a rectangle about 1/2″ to 3/4″ thick (the biscuits will double when they bake so you can press them out about 1/2 as thick as you want the finished product to be). Then I take a sharp knife and cut the biscuits in squares or rectangles – or whatever shape they turn out to be. I usually get about 8 biscuits out of a single recipe. Spread the biscuits out a little on the baking sheet and stick them in the oven for 10 or 11 minutes until golden.
You can also make these the old fashioned way by rolling them out with minimal flour and cutting them with a circle cutter, then re-rolling your scraps and cutting out the rest. This method will turn out a more dense biscuit.