World Baking Day

Hello again! If I'm being completely honest, I've done a lot less baking than usual the past couple months. You'd think being in quarantine I would be baking more since I'm working from home. However, I started a new career during all this mess and have been definitely keeping busy with it and working long/odd hours. I'm not complaining though because it's a rewarding job and I actually enjoy what I'm doing very much! It's been making this whole pandemic fly by, really. Also, in my spare time I've been busy helping get our house ready to put on the market since we'll be officially moving in the next couple weeks hopefully!

Anyway, I saw on my calendar that today is World Baking Day and I thought it would be a good opportunity to get back at it since it fell on a weekend! I wanted to make something I've never made before and something I was craving. I asked Jon what he wanted, but he said apple pie and that clearly wasn't something different (LOL)! My friend Katie posted some scones she made on instagram recently and it made me hungry for them. My favorite is lemon blueberry, so I was thinking of making those...BUT one of my favorite desserts is strawberry shortcake and I've been craving it as well. I've never made either of these from scratch, so I did a poll on instragram asking which one I should bake. Strawberry shortcake won - so here we are!

There's a couple different ways to make strawberry shortcake. As a kid my parents would often get those little pre-made sponge cake cups from the grocery store and we would put strawberries and canned whipped cream on them and call it a day. I've also had it by getting a store bought angel food cake and then putting the strawberries and whipped cream on it. I could've done that and made the sponge cake or angel food cake from scratch, as well as the whipped cream. The last time I had strawberry shortcake though was at The Bakery in Altoona (which has now closed and I'm very sad about it) and they used homemade biscuits. I've never had it that way before and I REALLY enjoyed it - so I decided to go that route!

I made homemade sweet biscuits from scratch, cut up strawberries and added sugar to them and then made homemade whipped cream. I've only made biscuits from scratch once back in high school and I've never made homemade whipped cream, so I was excited to dive in! Jon also really loves biscuits and never had strawberry shortcake before (what?!), so I figured it would be a good way to introduce the dessert to him. He really enjoyed it - we both did! I was also very impressed with how good the strawberries were...but I also keep forgetting it's already halfway through May. Here's the recipe I used. I brushed the biscuits with buttermilk and sprinkled sanding sugar on them before putting them in the oven as the recipe suggested and I was extremely happy with that decision. I also made a roast with carrots in the Crock Pot for dinner today, so just imagine how good my kitchen smelled - it was such a delight! This might be the last thing I bake in this kitchen in our first home, which had me feeling a little sad...it's definitely bittersweet. However, I'm excited to have a giant island at our apartment in Pittsburgh...it will make baking so much nicer!