By Brooke Luna
Years ago, on a small, family farm in Southern Michigan, a love and passion for baking were taking hold in the heart of a young Donna Ellett. A love fostered by those around her, Ellett recalls rapturously watching as her mother baked bread from scratch with flour freshly milled from the wheat her father had brought in from the field.
Continuing to nurture this love as she got older, after she married, Ellett would bake her own bread and cinnamon rolls at home to sell to businesses and at local farmer’s markets.
Yet after all those years of home baking, living in Texas while she attended college, and living for a while in Louisiana, Ellett had still never tasted or baked a biscuit. (As a Southerner, that's hard to believe, I know! But, you see, on the farm in Michigan, Ellett said everyone ate toast with their morning meals). However, that all changed when Ellett moved to Tennessee to be closer to her son and grandkids.
“If a girl from the North moves South, she needs to learn how to make biscuits,” she says.
Her recipe is the culmination of flipping through countless cookbooks and scouring sites online until settling on one she liked, with some (Southerner-approved) adjustments.
“I probably put in too much butter, but my little grandsons like it that way,” she says.
To mix the butter into the biscuit dough, she uses a special fork that her father-in-law, Briscoe Ellett Sr., used while he was in the Marine Corps because she says it’s sturdier than a regular dinnerware fork.
She places the freshly mixed biscuit dough on the floured surface of her kitchen counter, folding the dough as opposed to rolling it so the biscuits will form flaky layers while in the oven. After folding it, she molds the biscuits with the lid of a candy jar, leaving a design stamp in the dough, the sight of which causes her eyes to light up.
As she lines the biscuits up in rows on a baking sheet, she explains how baking not only offers a reprieve from her job as a facilities coordinator, but also a way to bond with her grandsons, whom she bakes biscuits with every Saturday morning.
“Just seeing their precious little hands pat out the dough is the sweetest thing in the world,” she says.
On this particular Saturday, while the biscuits are baking, Ellett flips open Southern Living’s 1985 Annual Recipes cookbook featuring two of her own recipes, which she submitted as a newlywed in hopes of receiving a free cookbook. She begins to reminisce but is interrupted by the sound of the oven’s timer.
The biscuits are done. Ellett places them in a wicker basket lined with a white tea towel, the phrase “Baked with Love” embroidered down the sides in pink.
“I’m not Martha Stewart. I don’t have a sous chef,” she says. “It’s usually two little boys saying ‘Grandma, I’m hungry.’ But I love to bake. I just love it.”
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