Tuesday 16 August 2011

52 Week Recipe Challenge - Week 7

This week I had planned to do another savoury dish but my sweet tooth got the better of me and I started raiding my cookbooks for a sweet recipe to satisfy my need for sweet treats. It’s because of this that I decided to try to make Strawberry Shortcakes, I like to think of them as shortbread meets Eton mess. (Only minus the meringues!) This recipe comes from my food processor cook book: Kenwood Creative Food Processor Cooking by Becky Johnson.

To make this recipe you need

175g Butter
75g Caster Sugar
2 Drops Vanilla Flavouring
225g Plain Flour
A Pack of Strawberries
A tub of whipped cream.

I started making this dish by getting my ingredients out, pre heating the oven to Gas Mark 4/ 180c then greasing my baking trays and lining them with baking paper.  After I did this I measured my sugar and butter then put them in the food processor along with the vanilla flavouring then creamed them together with the knife attachment. (If I was feeling more energetic I would have put them in a bowl and mixed them with a wooden spoon...)

After I had done that I gave the measuring bowl a quick clean and dry in the hope the flour wouldn’t stick to the bottom after I had measured it, this was marginally successful. I then measured the flour and sifted it into the food processor and mixed it together with the creamed butter and sugar until it formed a dough.
Once that was done I sprinkled some flour on to my kitchen work top and tried to roll out the dough which kept sticking to the rolling pin. 

When I scraped off the dough, floured the rolling pin and rolled it out to half a centimetre thick I started trying to cut it out into shapes.  I had lots of success with the circle biscuit cutter but my dinosaur one was a flop, the head, tail and legs kept falling off. (I think it’s a because it’s a Diplodocus shape, it wouldn’t happen with a Tyrannosaurus shape.) After eventually realising I wouldn’t be able to make dinosaur shortbread I finished cutting the shortbread into circles and put them in the oven for about 10 minutes until them were a slightly darker shade of brown.

I then let the shortbread cool as I washed and then cut up my strawberries. After doing that I put them to one side as I cleaned the food processor, dried it then put the tub of whipping cream into it and whipped it until it was thick had swirly patterns in it, once that was done I mixed the cream and strawberries together.
The final step was to find shortbread biscuits of roughly the same size and put this mixture in the middle of them.

This was very tasty and although I think the description on the recipe, where it says: ‘they can be on the table in 20 minutes from start to finish’ is a lie, they are a lovely treat.

No comments:

Post a Comment