Redneck Cookin'

I love Paula Deen. I love her because her voice is a little piece of home. I love her because she looks like, and her voice sounds an awful lot like BFE Michelle's mother. I love her because, like a lot of southerners, she has pretensions of grandeur but if you just barely scratch the surface you'll find a pure redneck. In other words she gets a bit "above her raisin' " but in an endearing way. Don't believe me? Watch her show and see how many of her recipes use mayonnaise, canned fruit, or.. and this is the ultimate... canned biscuits.

Canned biscuits go into an odd category of life's adventures: the necessary evil. Canned biscuits, like instant grits and powdered tea mix are something that no true southerner would consume if the real thing was nearby. But they do in a pinch.

Last week Ms. Paula made a coffee cake that I thought would have to be either the best thing I ever tasted, or a culinary train wreck. The main ingredient? Canned biscuits.

While I was in Connecticut I mentioned the recipe to Michelle, and she agreed with me that this was a culinary experiment that had to be tried. The recipe is pretty simple, canned biscuits formed into a ball around a teaspoon of cream cheese, and rolled in a mixture of orange zest, nuts, sugar and butter. The biscuits are then shoved into a bundt pan and cooked as a mass. (You can find the actual recipe here.)

Our product looked like this:


And let me tell you that it was DELICIOUS. It was sweet without being overpowering, the cream cheese was perfect, and the combo of nuts and oranges is fabulous. If you are looking for a quick, fun, tasty recipe, this is the one I recommend. Get in your kitchen, get your redneck ingredients out, and get cookin'!!

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