Strawberry Shortcake
Strawberry shortcake doesn’t make the list of particularly difficult things to make…it’s a biscuit after all. Now, having said that, some of you will say no, I thought it was a cake?? Most of us grew up with the single serving cake “cups” that were sold to us as the base for strawberry shortcake, right? You know the ones:
Well, as much as you may like those cups and cake with your strawberries, technically, that’s not a shortcake it’s a sponge cake. A shortcake is a sweet biscuit. While we have made countless batches of homemade biscuits at our house, we have never made them sweet. This recipe made the list because we knew that the fruit, especially berries, were going to be in season and we wanted to highlight some fruit in our recipes. As far as the shortcake is concerned, it really isn’t the star in this dessert (which is the case for many fruit desserts). Really good strawberries are the star but without the shortcake (and whipped cream), we would just be eating sweetened strawberries and there’s nothing special about that. Adding those ingredients and presenting them layered into a strawberry shortcake elevates it to a very impressive, yet simple dessert fit for guests.
For this week’s recipe, we used a book that we have never used in this year’s baking endeavor. There was no way we weren’t going to use Aubrey’s very first cookbook for this one: Strawberry Shortcake’s Berry Yummy Cookbook. I think she got that book when she was 4 or 5 and we had plans to make many of the recipes at that time. We made a few, but, as with many best laid plans…we got too busy to finish what we started. The best part of this cookbook is paging through it and finding little 5 year old Aubrey’s comments on so many pages. Some of the recipes were deemed “Yum” others were “Yum Yummy” and still others were “Yum Yum Yummy”. I love thinking about little Aubrey paging through her first cookbook and writing her first version of “recipe notes”. Now her notes specify changes in quantities or ingredients or preparation notes but she got her start with Strawberry Shortcake’s cookbook!
As usual, we made a few ingredient substitutions. We used half all purpose and half whole wheat flour today and used the Sola artificial sweetener for both the biscuit and the strawberries. We almost always use unsweetened almond milk instead of cow’s milk and we did so with this recipe. (If you ever wondered why, first, Logan is lactose intolerant and, second, there is a huge caloric difference between 1 cup of milk and 1 cup of almond milk.). We did not whip our own cream and used either the Light Cool Whip or the Reddi Whip Fat Free, depending upon who was eating it. (Personally, I like the Reddi Whip and the Cool Whip.)
Ingredients
- 2 pints strawberries
- 1 cup sugar
- 1 stick unsalted butter, cut into chunks (make sure butter is very cold)
- 2 cups flour
- 3 tsp baking powder
- 1 tsp salt
- 1 cup milk
- whipped cream
Method
- Preheat oven to 400 degrees.
- Wash the strawberries in a colander.
- Hull the strawberries and chop them into small pieces.
- Mix the strawberries with 1/4 cup sugar. Set aside the rest of the sugar. Refrigerate the strawberries for at least 30-60 minutes.
- While the strawberries are in the fridge, make the shortcakes. Measure the butter, flour, baking powder, salt, and the rest of the sugar in the food processor.
- Turn the food processor on and combine the ingredients until they look like bread crumbs. Slowly add the milk and pulse until the dough clumps together.
- Place the shortcake dough on a lightly floured surface and pat it down until it holds together. It should be about 1/2-inch thick. Use the cookie cutter to cut out the shortcakes. Place the shortcakes on a baking tray, 1 inch apart.
- Bake the shortcakes for 10-15 minutes, or until they are light brown on the outside. Remove from the oven and cool on a wire rack.
- When you are ready to serve the strawberry shortcakes, split the shortcakes in half and arrange the bottom halves on a plate. Put strawberries and whipped cream in the middle of each shortcake, then put the top half of the shortcake back on. Add extra berries and whipped cream on top!
“Tip from Strawberry Shortcake: You can use flower-shaped or heart-shaped cookie cutters to make your strawberry shortcakes extra-special!”
Our Experience
For this bake, we were, once again, pressed for time. Aubrey starting a new job is going to challenge our timing for the rest of the year!
We started by cleaning and slicing the strawberries. I considered using my Pampered Chef chopper but it doesn’t hold very many berries and I felt like loading and unloading it would be a pain. So, I sliced them all by hand. By the end of it, I reconsidered my hesitation to use my chopper.
Even though we use a sugar substitute, the sweetener will pull the juices out of the berries too. That’s the reason for preparing the berries first and letting them sit for at least 30-60 minutes. They’ll get sweet and juicy creating their own kind of syrup.
The recipe called for the use of a food processor and we went to the KitchenAid mixer instead. Again, I don’t have a food processor big enough for most recipes and I prefer to use the mixer anyway! We begin again by adding the dry ingredients to the bowl, cube the fat (butter), and using the paddle attachment cut the butter into the dry ingredients.
When we make our standard biscuits, we like to leave a few bigger chunks of butter in it (heard that suggestion one time on Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives), so, we did the same with this recipe.
After adding the milk, the dough was beaten with the paddle until it was lumpy but all combined and then turned out onto the countertop to press together to make a ball.
We didn’t get a photo of the dough rolled out, but you know what that looks like anyway. We cut the biscuits with a scalloped cookie cutter just for fun.
After years of making biscuits, I have started cutting the scraps with the cookie cutter too. I used to leave them in a flattened out lump but noticed that they never raised like the cut biscuits did. To save time, I started cutting my biscuits into squares and noticed that the edges never raised like the cut sides. So, now I cut all the sides, even on the scraps, and never have the problem of the un-cut sides not raising.
If you use whole wheat flour, you have to figure out what color of brown it is when it is “done”. We are still learning that color but it is getting easier.
We baked our shortcakes in the afternoon, so they were completely cooled before we assembled them for dessert after supper. I would guess that a nice warm biscuit would have been just as good! We cut the shortcakes in half, put some whipped topping down then strawberries, a little bit more topping, the shortcake top, whipped topping, strawberries, and then topped it off with some more whipped topping. We used the topping as a sort of glue to help them to stick together.
What we liked.
If you’re looking for a “bang for your buck” type of dessert, this one is it. We make homemade biscuits all the time so this, in our opinion, took very little effort and was something we could practically make with our eyes closed but, it looks good enough to serve to guests. I love the simplicity of it and that it could be made ahead of time and assembled whenever you want to serve it.
This dessert was enjoyed by EVERYONE in the house, so it earned a 5 out of 5. It wasn’t a difficult dessert to find somebody willing to finish up the last of them. (they lasted two days, tops)
What we would change.
The recipe called for rolling it out to 1/2 inch thick before cutting and that was fine, but for a thicker biscuit, roll it a little thicker and cook a bit longer. I love biscuits all by themselves so I don’t need them in a dessert, especially, when they aren’t the star of the show. 😉 The recipe is simple enough that there aren’t many things that could be changed if we wanted to. I would only note that the amount of strawberries seemed like a lot so either reduce the amount of them a little or enjoy a lot more of them with your shortcakes than we did. (Not that having extra chopped strawberries is a bad thing, Logan ate them as a snack all by themselves once the shortcakes were gone.)
What we learned.
Our biggest learning experience here was the idea of adding sugar to a biscuit to make it a dessert. My mom used to make biscuits all the time and we just ate regular biscuits for strawberry shortcake. The addition of sugar helps to sell the biscuit as a dessert pastry.
We had a lot of fun paging through the cookbook too and laughing at Aubrey’s notes. We wondered why some were just “Yum” while others were “Yum, Yum, Yummy”. Aubrey managed, after some arm twisting, to give me her rating for these and they earned a “Yum”. Yum meaning she would definitely eat again, but it doesn’t rank up there with the blueberry muffins!
Until next week, Happy Baking!