Shortcake perfection
Summer and birthdays call for a more refined strawberry cream cake
Strawberry shortcake will never change. Why should it? The perfectly balanced trifecta of strawberries, cream and cake make it hard to improve, and next to impossible to screw up. I should know. It’s the first cake I mastered. It’s also the official cake of my birthday season and a sharp, creamy highlight of summer.
My first strawberry shortcake recipe employed a Sara Lee All Butter Pound Cake. My memory of that recipe has improved with age, even though I haven’t made or eaten a Sara Lee pound cake in four decades. So as part of my 50th birthday festivities, I staged a strawberry shortcake showdown: Sara Lee vs. what I’ve learned since.
Given the delicate architecture of strawberry shortcake, any adjustments must be subtle. Every addition must be in support of the existing three pillars: strawberries, cream, cake. Thus, I take a redundancy-based approach, only adding flavors similar to what is already there.
My friend Sue adds yogurt to her whipped cream, which is redundant in terms of both tartness and creaminess. Years back she used yogurt instead of whipped cream, a borderline violation for which her kids would eventually bust her.
“As the kids got older and wiser they began demanding whipped cream, so now we use 50/50 full fat yogurt and whipped cream,” she says.
Dessert after lunch is part of the daily bargain on Sue’s farm, and if dessert is strawberry shortcake that day she mixes the cake batter while the oven preheats and gets it in before starting to fix lunch. No butter or eggs and hardly any sugar, her cake is a far cry from Sara Lee’s, but the kids never corrected her on that one, Sue says. And it takes less time to bake than a Sara Lee does to thaw.
The other redundancies to my recipe include lemon, which adds a little sweetness, a lot of tang, and an aroma that dances gingerly with vanilla. I could have added the lemon to the pound cake, but decided to put it in the already sweet and tangy strawberry sauce, and put little chunks of tart rhubarb, rolled in sugar, into the cake. I also replaced the milk in Sue’s cake recipe with buttermilk, for yet another shade of acid.
The Sara Lee version looked sharp. The smooth, almost golden pound cake juxtaposed the stately whipped cream, stiffer without yogurt, keeping everything perfectly in place. Eating it was a nostalgic experience. But with a life of experience behind me now, the Sara Lee was, alas, plain Jane. It was stiff, and the flavors stayed separate when they should have mixed.
My relatively slovenly looking homemade version came together like a strawberry shortcake should. The flavors contrasted one another brilliantly, and the textures created a place of divine creamy sogginess that you could fall into forever, if only your belly could handle it. And while the cake took on moisture, it didn’t wilt under the creamy berry infusion.
It held its shape, and even retained a measure of crumbliness.
Since my new formulation is messier and harder to contain than the original Sara Lee, I served it as parfait, in glasses.