Strawberry Shortcakes

Last weekend, Mr Man and I picked our own strawberries!

Berry picking is something I fondly remember doing as a kid. My family used to go every summer, and we would spend hours picking fruit at the farms before going home with very full bellies and kilos of beautiful raspberries and blueberries.

We would eat the berries fresh for days, ripple them through vanilla ice cream and bake them into lovely desserts.

I hadn’t been for years, and wanted to take Mr Man on a bit of a berry-picking adventure.

The farm we chose had an abundance of strawberries for picking, and we set to work. It was a lot of fun hunting for the beautifully ruby-red, ripe berries among all the bushes, and there’s just something about the flavour of strawberries that is just so much richer and juicier when they’re eaten freshly picked, still warm from being in the sun.

In celebration of my beautiful berry haul, I wanted to make a recipe for you that celebrated fresh strawberries, and strawberry shortcakes kept coming to mind.

The idea of making a leavened “shortcake” dough didn’t really appeal though – I wanted my shortcake to be short, crumbly and crispy, with the creamy chantilly and fresh bursts of berry as a contrast. So I used some leftover sweet shortcrust dough I had in the freezer (from when I made this tart!) to put this dessert together.

There’s no strict recipe to my strawberry shortcakes! You could make a half batch of the dough I used. My basic sweet pastry would also work well for the biscuits. But feel free to just use some leftover shortcrust you happen to have in the freezer. And there are so many ways you could arrange the strawberries to make these pretty, so just have fun! X

I loved this shortcrust recipe, but this sweet tart dough would also work well.