Delectable Desserts - Strawberry shortcake

I try to stay away from dairy as much as possible, but after a visit to the Amish market left me with some blackberries and strawberries, and three friends coming into town, I decided I needed to make some strawberry shortcake.

I have a love hate relationship with shortcake.  When I was a kid, we always used bisquick, and it always tasted salty to me. I don't want salty in my dessert cake! This was an issue I had with almost all foods made with bisquick though, and I'm not sure if they've changed the formula over the years, or if I can't taste salt anymore, but after my friend's sister made us pancakes recently, I didn't taste the salt.  I still don't keep it on hand though, so I needed to find a good recipe to make these from scratch.

Even from scratch recipes tend to be a bit salty to me though, and contain things like a huge stick of Crisco.  I never have cream in the house, but I'd just gone to Costco, and out of a desire to not stop at the regular grocery store as well, picked up a whole quart of cream.  "Holy crap...that's a lot of cream that I don't want my husband to put in Kahlua,"  I wisely think to myself.



So, when I came across this recipe, I was happy to sacrifice half of the cream to this cause, and the other half to the cause of whipped cream. Instead of butter, eggs, or Crisco ..you use 1.5 cups of heavy cream.  Not healthy, but really tasty.

Strawberry Shortcake Recipe

2 cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
2 tablespoons sugar
3/4 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 cups heavy cream
Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F.
Sift together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, remaining 2 tablespoons sugar, and salt in a medium bowl. Add heavy cream and mix until just combined. Place mixture in an ungreased 8-inch square pan and bake until golden, 18 to 20 minutes.
Remove shortcake from pan and place on a rack to cool slightly. Cut into 6 pieces and split each piece in half horizontally. 

My changes are this:  I always made individual shortcakes in the past, but this time, I took the batter and just pressed it into a round cake pan, and sprinkled a little vanilla sugar on top.  I then cooked it for about 22 minutes until it was golden, and a toothpick came out clean.  I cut it into 8 pieces.  I also didn't have that many strawberries, so I mixed in blackberries. There were 5 of us, and I thought the shortbread would be gone in minutes, but we were either too full from a good dinner, or being health conscious, because there were 3 pieces of shortbread left over, and a little whipped cream.

To make the whipped cream, I put 1.5 cups cream, 2tb sugar into a bowl and used my awesome 1960's style hand mixer to whip it.  I hate making whipped cream...no matter how neat you are about it, it splatters, and I don't tend to be terribly neat.  The key, seems to be using a HUGE bowl, and not lifting the mixer up much.  I used a spatula at the same time to scrape the sides so that the mixer could do it's thing.  Also, I learned that whipped cream can really help you get back into your husband's good graces when you allow him the honor of taste testing, and licking the mixer attachment.

This was by far the best shortcake I've ever made, or had.  It's delicious and dense, but sweet and not at all salty.  Basically, the cream goes in there and makes some serious miracles occur.

Edited--I have no idea why the format was so screwed up. I was using someone else's computer, so perhaps that's why.  Sorry!