common kitchen: shortcake season

trial and error and returning to certainty

This letter is a little bit late – I like to write to you on Thursdays, and I’m sending this on a Monday already steeping in a new week. I knew in June I wanted to talk about strawberry shortcake. A treat I personally can’t get enough of during its short peak season, one I have served every summer solstice for the last several years, and since Osa was born as a half-birthday treat to celebrate being halfway to the next big year. This year will be the 6^th! And friends, that’s just wild to me. I had a vision, though, of creating a new shortcake recipe that we could all try for something fresh and special.

First I thought maybe a sourdough biscuit – something cumbly like a scone and buttery as can be, but with that whiff of wild yeast that I’ve come to love so dearly. So I made an overnight biscuit dough and had the strawberries washed and ready in the morning. What I didn’t think through was the shortness of shortcakes and longness of sourdough baking. If you bake with sourdough you know time itself is an ingredient – and in this case it was too much time. The biscuits tasted delicious, but the gluten development made them the opposite of short, and they didn’t have the right texture to become the dream vessel for strawberries and cream that I’d hoped they’d become.

Next I was thinking about cake. While I’ve always preferred making my strawberry shortcake with biscuits, some folks love it with something a little more cake-y. So, unwilling to release my grip on wanting to yeast-raise my shortcake, I made a sourdough bundt inspired by the classic Quatre-Quarts, or French pound cake. This cake was really, really nice. It was soft and classic and scented softly with nutmeg and vanilla. I want to work on this cake a little more before I share it, but lovely or not it still didn’t hit the right note to be a new favorite strawberry shortcake base. I was chatting with my friend Stevie about shortbread and grilled summer peaches while I was playing with these recipes last week, and she was talking about making a sheet pan cake to pile grilled fruit on to serve a crowd – how dreamy! Somewhere in between a classic French Quatre-Quarts and an American cookout with a sheet-pan of cake I’m going to come up with something positively delicious to share soon.

Two different ways to make shortcake a little longer, a missed Thursday deadline, and what I knew at the end was that all I wanted was the same biscuit recipe I’ve made every year. So that’s what I’m sharing here with you today, a reliable, simple, and perfect shortcake biscuit and a template for everything else you put on it. I know you don’t need a recipe for sliced strawberries with sugar on top, but just in case you haven’t made a lot of strawberry shortcake in the past I wanted to offer a guideline for how I think it’s done the nicest.