Not sure if I've mentioned this before or not but I live in the great state of Michigan. Its officially strawberry season and all of the local towns are having their Strawberry festivals. Its a great time to go out and enjoy the nice weather before it starts to get to hot and enjoy some STRAWBERRY SHORTCAKE. That is right you guessed it. Its officially strawberry shortcake week.
This week started with the posts that you will see later this week, trust me you will want to come back and look they are fantastic... but I wanted to start with a traditional strawberry shortcake recipe. Sometimes you just want the traditional dessert right?
It took me awhile to find a recipe that I wanted to use on the web. For starters a lot of them wanted you to use heavy cream, and it was a Sunday morning and I just didn't want to want to leave the house to get heavy cream. Then I realized a lot of them were in 8 inch round cake pans, which is ok since I have obviously have an 8 inch cake pan. The odd thing was that they would show these perfect round cut outs the size of biscuits from the round 8 inch cake pan... and the baking side of me was like that seems like a lot of work. The engineering side of me concluded that there would be lots of wasted shortcake that way. Taking rounds out of a round. So I finially landed on this recipe that took no heavy cream (yeah!) and baked in a 9 inch square pan.. and it said it was award winning. Ok I am in.
This is the recipe for the base:
Ingredients
2/3 cup sugar
1/4 cup shortening
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/4 tsp salt
1 1/2 cups flour
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 cup milk
Cream together the sugar and shortening, I did this in my stand mixer. Add the egg and vanilla and mix well. In a separate bowl combine the salt, flour, and baking powder. Add about half the dry mixture and half the milk, mix till combined. Add the remaining dry ingredients and the remaining milk and mix till combined again.
Put in a greased 9x9 square pan and bake for 20-25 minutes in a preheated 350 oven. Cool completely on a wire rack if you have one.
This is a picture of my shortcake right out of the oven. Yum!
While the cake is cooling mix prepare your strawberry topping.
Ingredients
Strawberries 4 cups
1/4 cup Sugar
I had a little over a quart of strawberries which was a good 4 cups of berries. To prepare the strawberries cut off the stems and then slice them into smaller pieces. I picked up this awesome strawberry slicer at a local cooking show. It is really fun and easy to use. You can take some aggression out on those strawberries :) I found a similar one MSC Joie Simply Slice Strawberry Slicer
if you are interested. 
Once the strawberries are cut up cover them with the sugar and let them sit for 20 minutes. During this time they will macerate. Make sure you put them strawberries in a bowl that is big enough to fit your potato masher.
Macrerate: to soften or decompose (food) by the action of a solvent.
After 20 minutes mash the strawberries. Store in the fridge until you are ready to eat.
Final assembly:
Cut a piece of shortcake out of the pan. Then cut it in half. Put the bottom layer on the plate, and top with strawberries. Add the second layer of cake and add more strawberries. Then top with some whipped cream. I used cool whip, but you could make your own if you like.
The base recipe originally came from the taste of home website. The topping originally came from the simply recipes website.
Happy Father's Day to all the dad's out there!
