It’s strawberry season and the strawberry vendors are set up roadside everywhere on the north shore. They really want to encourage large purchases. A flat of strawberries is now up to $25, and $15 for half of a flat. For the amount of people in this house, even with one of them a very enthusiastic strawberry eater, half a flat is still too much. So after too many chocolate strawberries are consumed, a very large amount of strawberries goes to waste here. We just can’t bring ourselves to eat them the natural way. Isn’t that crazy?
And so it wound up one day last week that we had some whipped cream in the refrigerator from a baking project ML did. And, as part of our work here compiling such things, she also had just found a special on take-out scones from the English Tea Room, whose scones are just about the closest thing to having them in England. These really great scones make an excellent base for strawberry shortcake.
A shortcake is really just a scone. And a scone is technically a sweet biscuit. So this might work with the biscuits from GW Fins too, if you, like us, drove through to pick up their biscuit dough.
The English Tea Room’s scones that we got as part of the “situation” were frozen so you just need to pop them in the oven. Yes, they are better there fresh out of the oven at the Tea Room, but you can’t do that now.
After baking a few scones, we sliced them in half, planning to use them as layers in the shortcake. Taking some of the over-ripe strawberries we hadn’t gotten to, we also sliced them, and layered them on the scones layers, making a tidy pile. Mary Leigh piped the whipped cream on top and it made for a small but delicious strawberry shortcake. A valuable discovery. The English Tea Room scones are the perfect size for an individual portion of this popular spring time dessert.
In these weird times, most people drive through restaurant pick-up lines and get food the regular way. We buy things like this and deconstruct them. It has made for some interesting eating.
