Strawberry Shortcake

Daniel informed me this week that we needed to have strawberry shortcake. Since strawberries were on sale, I thought that was a good idea. 

So today we tried it.

When my family had strawberry shortcake, we really meant strawberries and cream on angel food cake. Some people mean strawberries and spray cream on those little fake sponge cakes they sell in the stores by the bread. 

I had read recipes for strawberry shortcake before, though, and I knew it was supposed to be more like a biscuit than a cake. 

So tonight I pulled out four cookbooks and compared recipes. I picked the one that was the least amount of work (Thank you "Bed and Breakfast Cookbook"!). It said it made six, and I was going to double the recipe until I saw it had four cups of flour in it. I didn't think I needed to double it, and I was right. I made eight shortcakes, and they came out HUGE--as big as a small plate, not nearly the size of a biscuit like I had guessed (those, it turns out, belonged to the recipe in the 1950 edition of the "American Cookbook"--in that recipe, though, you had to roll them out and cut them, and then stack two biscuits and bake them that way).

And our conclusion:

There is a reason strawberry shortcake ends up in so many cookbooks. That was GOOD. It would have been better with real whipped cream, but when I was shopping yesterday I stood in front of the cream for a long time and couldn't remember why I thought I needed to buy it, so I didn't buy it. So we were stuck with cool whip. But with real fresh strawberries and real shortcakes--YUM.