Every year we make cranberry orange star biscuits for Thanksgiving. We occasionally make them when it’s not Thanksgiving. But we always make them star-shaped. It is truly the best shape for a biscuit, providing six perfect bites.

We lived in Austin for a few years, and star-shaped things are epidemic in Texas. If you’ve lived there, or even visited, you probably know what we’re talking about. One year at Thanksgiving we succumbed to the cultural influences and decided to make star-shaped biscuits. It was an inspired decision. Round biscuits are boring and crumbly. Star-shaped biscuits have perfect bite-sized points coming off of them. The eating procedure is crystal clear.

You can use any biscuit recipe – it’s the shape that matters. We like the “Flaky Biscuits” recipe from The Best Recipe a lot. It is reliable, easy, and doesn’t call for things (like buttermilk) that we don’t keep around the kitchen.

We add orange zest and dried cranberries after cutting in the butter and shortening. Yes, we use a microplane zester. We like the long narrow zester for this application. You can pull along the orange peel and the zest piles up neatly on top until you are ready for it.

To make our biscuits star-shaped, we use what looks like a cookie cutter. However, since it never gets used for cookies, it’s really a biscuit cutter.

Our oven is a little uneven and we forgot to rotate halfway through, so the front row got extra browned. They were still tasty.

Now you can see why we make them star-shaped. There are six perfect bites in each biscuit. Enjoy!