First of all, biscuits and scones have a lot in common. With a couple (crucial) exceptions, both contain the same basic ingredients: flour, butter or lard, and a liquid to bind the dough together. Like muffins and pancakes, they're both quick breads — a family of pastries that rely on chemical leavening (e.
g., baking soda and/or baking powder) rather than yeast to rise in the oven. Both scones and biscuits originated in the British Isles, brought by colonists to this continent.
And they're both, if they're made well, soft and tender within, and often a bit craggy and crunchy on the outside. You might see scones more often cut into triangular wedges and biscuits shaped into a circle — but each can really come in any shape. What divides them, then? The quickest answer is that scones tend to have less butter and more liquid; their dough, unlike biscuit dough, can sometimes include eggs and sugar.
Without the latter, biscuits can more easily straddle the sweet-savory divide, rendering them perfect for a that makes everyone happy. Bakers don't pile add-ins into biscuits (dried fruit, chocolate chips, ham and cheese) like they do with scones. With their higher fat content, biscuits are also sometimes laminated when they're being made — that is, the dough is folded over on itself to produce those fine, flaky layers.
Here's some of the backstory on these two pastries — relatives to one another, if not exactly twins. How biscuits and scones became American Biscuits and scones .