Today I had to pick a dessert to make for a backyard barbecue we were hosting for both adults and kids. I quickly decided that strawberry shortcake should have broad appeal. I looked around for a recipe and I settled on one from epicurious.com that actually involves making a cake -- in the past, I've always made biscuit-type strawberry shortcakes.
The cake batter includes cream cheese and milk, and it baked up into a rather plain looking cake. The strawberry sauce takes a bit of time and effort -- you cook down some chopped strawberries with lemon juice and sugar, puree the mixture, strain it, and the chill the sauce for a few hours. You add the sauce to some quartered strawberries that have been tossed with sugar and left out at room temperature until juices form.
To serve the shortcakes, you cut the cake into wedges, split each wedge into layers, fill the cake with strawberry sauce, and garnish with sweetened whipped cream. The cake wasn't all that interesting, but it was moist and had the perfect texture to soak up the strawberry sauce. The overall flavor combination was quite nice, but then again, it's pretty hard to go wrong with strawberries and whipped cream. And the dessert certainly did accomplish the goal of appealing to kids and adults alike. One of our little guests pronounced it "awesome," showed me the dessert plate he had scraped clean, and asked for the recipe! What more could I ask for?
Recipe: Strawberry Shortcakes from epicurious.com.
The cake batter includes cream cheese and milk, and it baked up into a rather plain looking cake. The strawberry sauce takes a bit of time and effort -- you cook down some chopped strawberries with lemon juice and sugar, puree the mixture, strain it, and the chill the sauce for a few hours. You add the sauce to some quartered strawberries that have been tossed with sugar and left out at room temperature until juices form.
To serve the shortcakes, you cut the cake into wedges, split each wedge into layers, fill the cake with strawberry sauce, and garnish with sweetened whipped cream. The cake wasn't all that interesting, but it was moist and had the perfect texture to soak up the strawberry sauce. The overall flavor combination was quite nice, but then again, it's pretty hard to go wrong with strawberries and whipped cream. And the dessert certainly did accomplish the goal of appealing to kids and adults alike. One of our little guests pronounced it "awesome," showed me the dessert plate he had scraped clean, and asked for the recipe! What more could I ask for?Recipe: Strawberry Shortcakes from epicurious.com.
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