"Cookie Cutter" Pipe Band Dress

[MacLowlife]

Jock, this may be like the old chips -crisps-fries problem, but Americans have a pastry cutter, too. In the US, a Pastry cutter is a tool used for blending pastry- if you need one and don't have it, you use a fork. Where Fluter and I come from, one punches cookies ( UK: Biscuits ) and biscuits (UK: scones? not really, rolls? Not that, either) out of dough using a circular cutter and then bakes them in the oven. If you need one and don't have it, almost anything will do- a glass, a soup can ( UK:tin ) any ring that can be pressed onto the surface of the rolled dough. And then, at Christmas or other times, you can use a more elaborately shaped device to cut out dozens of identical bears or stars or gingerbread men, or what have you- highland pipers, I suppose...

And now we need to know, if you made a dough from flour and baking soda and milk, rolled it out and cut discs from it, what would you call the baked discs in the UK? Hereabouts , we call them biscuits and eat them with jelly, or butter, or a slice of meat in them. How soft they are depends on how good a biscuit maker you are. I have seen them range from melt-in-your- mouth to hockey pucks.

[Paul Henry]

And now we need to know, if you made a dough from flour and baking soda and milk, rolled it out and cut discs from it, what would you call the baked discs in the UK? Hereabouts , we call them biscuits and eat them with jelly, or butter, or a slice of meat in them. How soft they are depends on how good a biscuit maker you are. I have seen them range from melt-in-your- mouth to hockey pucks.

Those would generally be called scones, but here we have them with Jam ( US Jelly)butter and sometimes even clotted cream.
They are usually sweet , but cheese scones( a small amount of grated cheese added to the mixture before baking) are popular as well.

I grew up in Northern Ireland and what we called "soda" bread is essentially the same thing,but baked on a griddle- on top of the cooker, but of course there are lots of variations.
One of my favourite variation is Wheaten bread, much the same but made with wheatmeal flour and buttermilk and baked in the oven, with butter- and of course served with smoked salmon and black pepper is wonderful