Strawberry Shortcake

Pavlova or shortcake? Believe it or not, I lost some night's sleep over that question. My mom brought home some strawberries yesterday. They were at the peak of their ripeness so I knew I only had time to make one dessert with them - where eating them raw will still be pleasurable. So...Pavlova or Shortcake?


In the end, I obviously went with shortcake. The winning point? Shortcake wouldn't require me to think of ways to use leftover egg yolks. Haha hey, it was almost 2am and I wanted to go to bed.
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You can control the sweetness of the shortcake by controlling the amount of sugar in the whipped cream. You can toss the hulled and sliced strawberries in a couple tablespoons of sugar to make them juicy - the shortbread does a good job in absorbing the juices. Yum!

I adapted the recipe from here.

STRAWBERRY SHORTCAKE

Ingredients
195g all-purpose flour
40g sugar
6g baking powder
2g salt
125g (1stick) butter
65g milk

Procedure
1. Preheat oven to 450F.
2. Lightly grease an 8X8X2 pan. --- The shortbread has enough butter so there's no need to go crazy on greasing the pan.
3. Mix flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt together.
4. Cut in butter using a pastry blender/a fork/your fingers until mixture resembles coarse cornmeal. --- Make sure you have cold butter so you won't have a hard time
5. Make well in center, pour in milk and mix just until moist. --- It can get quite sticky so use a fork or a spatula
6. Press lightly into the pan. --- This step can take some time; spread the batter as evenly into the pan as possible
7. Bake 15-20 minutes.
8. Cool, then cut into bars.
9. Store in an airtight container.

For the whipped cream, I used 125g whipping cream and just literally whipped air into it until it formed stiff peaks. When I was in pastry school, as part of our training, we used to whip creams and meringues by hand. But I highly suggest using a hand mixer. There's a reason they were invented haha. You can add sugar (I prefer powdered sugar but only because it dissolves faster) by the tablespoon as you are whipping the cream 'til you reach the right amount of sweetness for you.