Sometimes we try to make nice things in our kitchen, for example, this weekend when I tried to make homemade shortcakes for the Easter strawberry shortcake. Technically they should have come out perfectly and they looked great in the pan but by the time the cheapo stove in my apartment browned the tops of the shortcakes to a pleasant golden hue the bottoms were rather reminiscent of a scorched-earth exercise. They were tough as hockey pucks and I am considering donating the leftovers to the San Jose Sharks.
Saturday morning after a lazy breakfast and post-breakfast nap, I was contacted by my friends who were preparing for our fun Easter dinner, held a day early due to child handoff scheduling complications. My dear friend bought a ham and the ingredients to make my favorite egg-free foolproof biscuits. I had fancy cheeses and crackers for the appetizer table and lots of greens to saute, and I figured I would make the biscuits since I have that recipe down cold. We were coordinating logistics when my friends boyfriend texted me with a plaintive, “where is a bakery that sells egg-free shortcakes?” and I couldn’t think of a single place because having an egg allergy really sucks and dessert is mostly something I have given up on. It was really sweet of him to try to make shortcakes from scratch to accommodate my stupid food issues, I give grand kudos for that. He also offered me a ride and wouldn’t be there for an hour, so I decided I could stop being utterly slothful and make shortcakes myself. I had good Irish butter, I had buttermilk, I had some sour cream but not enough to make my fabulous go-to biscuits, but I could find a recipe!
Thanks to the miracle of the internets I found a good sounding recipe for shortcakes that required heavy cream, so I thought I would thin buttermilk to heavy cream consistency and went to work.
The butter was gorgeous, if you find Dairygold butter in your store please do try it out, it is wonderful. It has less water than American butter and a rich, gold color and a really lovely cultured flavor.
I found some pretty, sparkly sanding sugar in my pantry that was Easter-ish in colors and used that on top of the shortcakes, and popped them into the oven to bake. My crappy oven only has one shelf so one batch had to wait while the other tray baked, and some of the Easter sugar got a tiny bit melted but otherwise looked fine.
At 15 minutes they were not the lovely golden brown I wanted, so I put them in for another 5 minutes at watched them like a hawk. And yet, despite this, the little suckers scorched on the bottom, probably because they had a lot of sugar in the dough, and my oven is a piece of junk.
After breathing deeply for a few minutes, I baked batch number two for 15 minutes on my new fabulous non-stick pan that my mom gave me, and they still burned.
I packed them up anyway because we had to have something, and took them over to my friend’s home, thinking, at least the upper part will taste good. But alas, this was not to be and I have no idea why.
The kids decided the whipped cream should be colored and they had a lot of fun choosing the colors. The final decision was purple and sky blue, and why not! I used a spoon to scoop up a bit of the shortcake, the beautiful sliced strawberries and the party whipped cream and could barely penetrate the shortcake. Perhaps a shovel might have helped.
The kids ate them and enjoyed them and every other part was fantastic but I swore internally at my bad cooking mojo. At least the savory biscuits came out fantastically! The ham and the carrots were great, but the greens I cooked had too much lime juice, oh well, more bad cooking mojo. Despite my angst, everyone had a nice time and it was a lot of fun to see the kids decorate eggs and have an impromptu squirt gun fight.
Since this was a fail and I am not sure if it was the recipe or if it was my mojo, I will not be sharing the recipe, unless you have a fervent wish to bake pretty hockey pucks, then please by all means, send me an email.
Heather in SF 
