Two-ingredient biscuits are the ultimate budget bake

Easy Drop Biscuits fall into a category I like to call back-pocket recipes: never-fail, reliably delicious things you can bake at a moment’s notice with just a few ingredients (see also: Key lime pie, cake pan cake, and shortbread).

They’re made with only two ingredients: self-rising flour and cream. That self-rising flour is the key — because the flour already includes baking powder and salt, it eliminates the need to mix any dry ingredients; the cream provides the necessary liquid (and fat). To make them, you just mix the two together until you have a cohesive dough.

Photography by Rick Holbrook; food styling by Kaitlin Wayne

But here’s the best part: You don’t even need to follow a recipe! The biscuit dough can be mixed by following a simple, scalable formula: equal parts self-rising flour and cream by weight, or two parts flour and one part cream by volume. If you’re stuck in an ill-equipped kitchen (or maybe on a campsite) or you only have a certain amount of self-rising flour or cream, you can scale the recipe up and down easily. You don’t even need measuring cups; you could measure with just a cup, can, or jar if that’s all you’ve got.

Unlike Buttermilk Biscuits, there’s no rolling, folding, or cutting; the dough is scooped and dropped by mounds onto a baking sheet (a tablespoon cookie scoop is a handy tool here). They bake for just 10 minutes, meaning the whole process takes little more than a quarter of an hour. The resulting biscuits are soft and tender — cakey rather than flaky, with a rich mouthfeel thanks to the cream.

Photography by Rick Holbrook; food styling by Kaitlin Wayne

The benefits of this recipe go beyond ease: Because the ingredients are so basic, Easy Drop Biscuits have become my favorite budget bake for weeknight meals or a quick weekend breakfast. A bag of King Arthur self-rising flour costs $6.95, while a quart of heavy cream costs $6.39 at my local Target. Doing a little math, that comes out to about $1.72 per batch of 12 biscuits, or $0.14 per biscuit. Not bad! (For context, a refrigerated roll of Pillsbury Grands! Biscuits comes out to about $0.50 per biscuit based on prices at my local Target.)

One 5-pound bag of self-rising flour yields around 160 biscuits, so keeping a bag in your pantry will have you 15 minutes away from a hot batch of freshly baked biscuits for a long time. And while the basic recipe is satisfying on its own, you can customize it with mix-ins of your choice, like a combination of bacon, cheddar, and chives, or cooked sausage and diced apples. See inspiration at the bottom of the recipe page to get started.   

Easy, fast, and inexpensive? Three great reasons to make these biscuits part of your repertoire.

Cover photo (Easy Drop Biscuits) by Rick Holbrook; food styling by Kaitlin Wayne.