Mom's angel biscuits

Add 2 tablespoons of water, 20 grams of sugar (2 tablespoons) and all of the yeast into a small bowl and stir to combine.

Weigh your flour and add the rest of the sugar (80 grams). Stir to combine. 

Add the shortening to the flour and sugar and using a pastry cutter or large fork, mix the shortening into the flour until the shortening is fully coated by flour and the lumps of shortening are pea sized.

Combine the buttermilk and the water, sugar, and yeast mixture to the flour and shortening to bring together as a dough. Stir around 15 or 20 times to incorporate everything. Overworking the dough at this stage could cause your finished biscuits to be more tough. Your dough at the end of 15 or 20 stirs will be very shaggy and not smooth at all. 

On a floured surface dump out dough and roll with a rolling pin. If you don't have a rolling pin, you can just use your hands. Dust with flour as needed when dough gets sticky. Fold the dough over on itself a couple of times.

Roll or flatten the dough into a rectangle about 1/4 to 1/2 inch thick/tall.

With a small 2-inch to 2.5-inch cookie or biscuit cutter, cut biscuits into circles and place on parchment paper lined baking sheet. When cutting, you do not want to twist the cutter. Twisting while cutting will ruin any layers that you created with folding. Place your cut biscuits next to each other (touching) on the sheet pan. Touching biscuits help each other rise taller. 

After cutting biscuits, you can grab any scraps of dough and reroll and re-cut them. There's no need to waste any dough. The last few biscuits might not look as uniform as the first ones, but they will all taste the same. 

Allow the shaped biscuits to rest on the sheet pan, covered by another inverted sheet pan or greased plastic wrap for one hour to rise. 

Bake at 425 degrees F (218 C) for 10 to 12 minutes. Check around the 10 minute mark to make sure they do not brown too much.

When biscuits are done, transfer them from your baking pan onto a cooling rack to stop the bottoms from cooking further.

Paint the melted butter on top of each biscuit.

Serve and enjoy.