Strawberry Shortcake

A coworker asked me to make a strawberry shortcake for him. I explained that strawberry shortcakes are usually something you put together right before you eat it because the strawberries sweat from the sugar and make everything soggy. I came up with some ideas to make him a strawberry shortcake-like cake. Basically using all of the strawberry shortcake ingredients, but figuring out a way to make it last a day or two. It took some research.



First, I decided I would create a strawberry glaze or jelly type topping. This would prevent the strawberries from ruining everything, but you would still get all the flavor. This is done pretty easily by boiling strawberry puree with some sugar and maybe a little lemon juice. You cook it down until it thickens. You can add gelatin or corn starch if you want it to thicken faster.

I then had to find a good shortcake recipe. I found one that tasted pretty good. I tried it all as I put it together to make sure that it would all taste good. I baked two layers of the shortcake.

The next problem I had was making a whipped cream that wouldn't break down. Sure, I could make whipped cream icing, which I don't care for, but that would have had a different flavor. Instead I made something called stabilized whipped cream. You make the whipped cream from scratch and just as it is whipped, you add some melted gelatin to it. It sets up the whipped cream and doesn't change the flavor. The texture is just slightly different than regular whipped cream, but it won't break down and run on you. It's really cool stuff.

I assembled the shortcake by treating it just like a cake. Level off the layers, put whipped cream between them, then stacked them up. I covered the whole thing with whipped cream and then put the cooled strawberry mixture on the top. After that, I piped some of the whipped cream around the edges to make it look nice.

Unfortunately, the buyer didn't like the result. He said that it was really hard to cut. When I had it, it cut just fine, because I had to cut the layers to level them. It's possible that the shortcake just doesn't keep, but he didn't have any of it to return to me to check it out. Since the cake was covered with a fairly wet coating, I can't imagine that it dried out much. Alas, this was my first unhappy customer. Usually, I would try to make things right, but I tried to talk the guy out of this idea to begin with, so I simply let this one go. I haven't tried this one again, but I might make another one just to see if I can figure out what might have gone wrong, or if he was just being overly picky because he was expecting something different, like those spongy yellow cakes you get at the store and put the red goo and strawberries on. Who knows. I thought it looked great though!