Strange kitchen.
Having blogged several of my mom's mother's baked goods, I will now impart the sole dish that I learned from my dad's mother. Technically, I learned it from my mother, who learned it from Dad's mother. And technically, I don't have her exact shortcake biscuit recipe. Mom might still have it somewhere, but it never got passed on to me. (Aunt Nancy? Help?) Granny generally disliked cooking but, having married into a family with notoriously sweet teeth, became fairly proficient at dessert out of necessity. This version of strawberry shortcake is from Dad's side of the family. My mother's family makes strawberry shortcake with those horrible yellow spongy cakes from the grocery store, to which I say, ew. A homemade biscuity thing is much, much better.
So I found myself at my dad's new house for spring break, along with some rapidly wilting strawberries that had been deemed not quite awesome enough to eat as-is.
I always have to bake something for my father, so why not strawberry shortcake?
Step zero: Preheat oven to 425. Place the beaters of your electric mixer into a very clean metal bowl, then put the bowl in the freezer.
Step one: Wash, hull, and slice about 1 quart strawberries. Taste a couple of representitive slices for sweetness. Sprinkle sugar over berries - anywhere from 1/8 to 1/3 cup, depending on how many berries you have and how sweet you want them to be. Stir a bit. Leave on the countertop while you do everything else.
Personal tip: Do not refrigerate the berries before you slice them. They don't spoil any less quickly in the fridge, really. More importantly, trying to hull and slice cold berries is really unpleasant. Obviously, if you have syrupy leftovers, they need to go in the fridge.
In the absence of Granny's authentic biscuit recipe, I use this one from About.com, which I typically modify slightly. I do not turn the dough out and knead it properly. For two to three kneads, why bother? I just sort of mash it around in the bowl a little. I also make these as drop biscuits rather than rolled biscuits. This is mainly because I hate cleaning up after kneading and rolling sticky biscuit dough. It works fine. Nor do I brush the tops with milk or sprinkle them with sugar. Not necessary. Incidentally, you also don't need to use a buttered foil-lined baking sheet. I use an ungreased sheet. There's enough butter. It's fine.
Cooking in someone else's kitchen is always a challenge. In Grandma's kitchen, the challenge is that I don't know where anything is (and, since the kitchen was remodeled recently, neither does Grandma half the time). In Dad's kitchen, the challenge is that neither he nor his wife bake. So it's not that I can't find things, it's that they don't exist. There is a food processor, but it's a mini prep. I asked for a pastry cutter and was told "There's a pizza cutter..." So I used two steak knives to cut in the butter.
You may also have noticed that this is a Pyrex casserole dish, not a mixing bowl. There are no proper large mixing bowls here. It's about improvising.
What you can't tell from that picture is that the flour is a little far gone. Still edible, but not so fresh. "How old is it?" I asked, because flour has, you know, a good long shelf life. I was informed that the flour was originally from St. Louis, which means a) it is at least two years old and b) they moved half a Tupperware tub of flour from St. Louis to Virginia. I...would have thrown it out in St. Louis and bought a new tub once I got to Virginia. But to each their own.
I did encounter some objects from my childhood. This tiny mixing bowl and this 1/2 cup! I learned to measure with this very 1/2 cup (and its brothers, which have probably all melted in dishwashers now). It must be at least 25 years old. Good cup.
Gone, sadly, is the other set of mixing bowls in which I learned to mix. It was a set of three Pyrex-ish bowls. The baby bowl was yellow and the daddy bowl was red. I don't know what happened to them--maybe Mom has them? The mommy bowl was white with a pattern of abstract geometric roosters across the top rim. That bowl got broken during a particularly experimental moment in which I attempted to make homemade peanut butter cups while on Rollerblades. Yes, I was old enough to know that cooking and Rollerblades don't mix. And yes, I was allowed to Rollerblade in the house.
But I digress.
This is how I form my biscuits. I like to get eight out of the recipe, but you could make them smaller or larger.
This is me doing obnoxious hipster photography.
This is what you should do while the biscuits are baking: create homemade whipped cream. You did buy heavy whipping cream, right? Whipped cream from a can is wrong. It's just wrong, folks. Maybe it's acceptable for Jell-O, but that's about it. The real stuff is so much better. (Don't even get me started on Cool Whip.) Pour about 8 oz. into your nice cold bowl, add a tablespoon or two of granulated sugar and a teaspoon or two of vanilla, and whip it.
This is what the biscuits look like. Let 'em cool for just a few minutes. You want to eat them warm, though.
*Yes, I did deliberately line up my biscuits with the teapot. I have to have some continuity in my food photography.
After tasting these particular biscuits, which had a slight plastic Tupperware container aftertaste, it was decided to throw out the St. Louis flour and purchase Virginia flour.
And this is what the whole thing looks like assembled. The cereal bowl and literal sundae spoon are also childhood relics. We used to have a whole set of sundae spoons. Each one was a different color. This is the last one left, though. Sigh.
Thus ends the tour of a few transplanted childhood kitchen objects.
Media pairing:
You thought I was going to post Strawberry Shortcake, didn't you? Didn't you?! WELL, I SHOWED YOU! Rainbow Brite was, and remains, superior.
I had sushi for dinner tonight and ordered a rainbow roll, too. So there.
