Strawberry Shortcake

This challenge has now become so much more challenging than I had ever anticipated. My arm is still in a sling so I have yet to cook anything new. I found the photos I took in my old house when I’d made the strawberry shortcakes so that’s what we’re looking at today. Delicious strawberry shortcake.

So this is recipe 90 of the challenge, and there are only 25 recipes to go. But with only 37 days left and my arm in a sling, I’m trying to stay calm about it. Sometimes I catch myself whistling the tune to ‘Time Is On My Side’ by the Rolling Stones, like some sort of fucked up musical mantra. Other times it’s ‘Don’t Worry, Be Happy’ by Bobby McFerrin.

So in the interest of saving time let’s jump straight in.

You can find these bad boys on page 190 of the Good Book. (Nope, not the bible, the Thug Kitchen Official Cookbook: Eat Like You Give a Fuck)

I made the filling as instructed. Maaaaan, those strawberries smelled amazing, and a few disappeared before they made it to the bowl. (See, I do magic tricks too. Who says you can’t have it all?)

I moved on to making the biscuits, and being the cynical bitch that I am I cheekily checked to see if the Thugs had “cheated” and shortcutted and just used the same recipe as the breakfast biscuits on page. They hadn’t, and I felt a quick pang of shame for having doubted them, but those feelings quickly dissolved after I popped another strawberry in my mouth. Hard to care with a strawberry in your mouth. (Nothing like numbing feelings with food right?)

I got my four-year-old to help me sift the flour and other dry ingredients, because…well…free child labor right? JEEZ, I’M KIDDING! He loves to help me in the kitchen. He gets to dip his fingers in the bowl and lick chocolatey spoons. All the good shit, so just relax. PUT. DOWN. THE. PHONE. TO. SOCIAL. SERVICES.

No children were harmed in the making of these tasty desserts. Neither were any animals by the way. Just sayin’. #veganasfuckshortcakes

We dug a well in the middle, poured in the wet ingredients, and stirred it all together to make the ‘shaggy dough’ My kid loved this part. He went and put on sunglasses and said it was like being at the beach. He ran off to look for a spade and a bucket mid-food prep. You think I’m kidding, but I’m really not. Everything takes so much longer when kids are involved.

If you’d seen my floor. Flour everywhere. But this is the shit memories are made of.

(unless they’re acid flashbacks, then that’s a different story.)

While these little bastards were sunning themselves in the oven I made the whipped cream from page 192. When I was done my kid licked the beaters like he was a dog and he hadn’t seen his owner all day. At one point they looked like they’d been superglued to his face.

Who can blame him though, that creamless whipped cream is sweeeeet!

When the licking was done, so were the shortcakes. They were sun-kissed and golden like they’d been poolside with cocktails. I waited and let them cool a bit before I cut them in half. Then I slathered creamy coconutty whipped cream all over their golden bottoms like sun cream, and drowned them in strawberries.

The end result was a sort of crazy, delicious frenzy in my kitchen. One minute the shortcakes were there, the next minute they were not.

Before they were swallowed by large appreciative appetites, I had a crazy thought. I had recently had a sumptuously mouth-watering strawberry and pesto salad, and I wondered if this combination would work in one of the shortcake biscuits (without the whipped cream obviously). I know basil pesto sounds like a weird thing to combine with strawberries, and maybe it was a pregnant woman or a stoner* who first invented this, but it just works. Trust.

Turns out it’s pretty damn good. I used a basil pesto I’d made from scratch the day before using fresh basil and some pine kernels I’d traded for a sofa (Yes, it may be a bit odd…but we were moving, needed to shift some furniture and pinekernels make me happy.)

After the pesto-strawberry combo working out in weird and surprising ways, I was on a roll. I decided to try peanut butter with the strawberry filling too. Man that was good. Beyond good.

Sort of like peanut butter and jam sandwiches, but with fresh succulent strawberries instead. I can’t even explain the yumminess. It’s like when you see a chubby newborn baby and you just wanna bite it in its leg. (I hope you know what I’m talking about otherwise I’m really painting myself in a weird light today)

All in all, delicious in several different combinations and the shortbread biscuits were versatile, and good both warm and cold. When they were warm the whipped cream almost melted into them.

I’m looking forward to making these again.