It all started innocently enough. A simple email saying we should do family dinner last Sunday night. Which snowballed from something low-key and simple to a weekend making barbecue, a trip to the farmer’s market for fresh produce, and topped off with homemade strawberry shortcake. I meandered my way to making strawberry shortcake, from banana pudding, to an ice box cake, to pound cake with strawberries, and finally decided on strawberry shortcake. I think fate had a hand in things, as there was only one vendor selling strawberries at the farmer’s market last Saturday, and I suspect local ones will become even harder to find as we slide into July.
I ended up using Elise’s shortcake recipe (from Simply Recipes). I probably would have made Deb’s because I’m intrigued by including hard boiled egg yolks in the biscuits, but since we don’t have a food processor in the house right now, I was a bit weary. Silly me, I was worried that 9 biscuits wouldn’t be enough for the 5 of us (I’m genetically plagued with making way too much food). I think I baked the biscuits for a few minutes longer than the recipe called for (I used the biscuits from scratch recipe and, yes, we hae 4 biscuits in the freezer because 9 was gracious of plenty). The one thing I did steal from Deb’s recipe was brushing the top of the biscuits with heavy cream and sprinkling sugar on them.
I’m sure they would have been great without the extra cream and sugar, but it definitely was a great touch.
With the fresh, local strawberries and homemade whipped cream, definitely a keeper for the recipe files.
