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The Art of Brown Sugar Biscuit Dispensery
April 29, 2012
There's an art to dispensing the brown sugar biscuits from Mayfield Bakery. While baking, lava rivulets of brown sugar melt and pool around the base of these flour and buttermilk buttes, after which they cool and harden into brittle amber flats.

As a family, we covet those brittle amber shards, which we unromantically call "crunchies," and the success of a Mayfield brown sugar biscuit can be determined by the thickness and amount of crunchies we get on the bottom of said biscuit. Returning from a Sunday morning trip to Mayfield, Dr. Mathra breathlessly described how the brown sugar biscuits -- still warm for oven -- were given to the customer in front of him.

"The guy behind the counter carefully lifted the biscuit off the sheet pan, and you could see massive plains of crunchies all around the edges!"

But when his turn came, a different counter person -- one who is untrained in the art of brown biscuit dispensery -- completely dashed our hopes for brown sugar biscuit perfection. "She pulled it off the pan and then INTENTIONALLY banged all the crunchies off the sides!" Dr. Mathra recounted, aghast at the sugar sacrilege.

I understand that knocking off the crunchies creates a clean edge and therefore might be seen as presenting a more attractive, refined pastry on the plate. But if there's anything the awkward brown sugar biscuit with its fissure-riddled top and heavily sloping sides is not, it's refined.

Today, when he got home from Mayfield, Dr. Mathra carefully set the heavy bag on the kitchen counter. Out came two massive brown sugar biscuits with veritable lakes of shimmering re-crystalized sugar flanking the edges.

"We got the crunchies guy," he said triumphantly.




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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Copyright © 2002-2012
Stephanie Vander Weide Lucianovic