Babbling Blueberry

Wakes up bright in a cake made of strawberry?
Livin right in a cake made of strawberry?
Strawberry Shortcake, wouldn’t ya know.

And me too!

I love Strawberry Shortcake!  The original Strawberry Shortcake, not the current tarted up version.  I think that I like thinking of people (and myself) as fruits and fruity desserts! 

I went with a fruity and fun crew to pick our own strawberries last weekend at Swanton Berry Farms near Santa Cruz.

We had a lot of fun picking strawberries.  Exhibit A:

And we also snuck in a few bites to keep ourselves full of energy.  And to do some quality control to make sure we were picking the best strawberries.  Exhibit B:

And the picking fun was enhanced by a little competition.  Exhibit C:

In addition to the informal competition, we had three official contests (photos from top -> bottom) biggest strawberry, ugliest strawberry, and best strawberry.  The winner of each category got to keep (and pay for!) all the entries in that category.

Which ones would you have voted for?

It’s time for me to brag a little… I won the best strawberry category!  Can you tell which one it is?  Although, I did pick at least twice as many strawberries as other people.  But I also was pretty stringent with only picking the very best ones.  So my “best strawberry” was really the best of the best, with a lot of bests.

We also rewarded ourselves after all of our hard work!  “White velvet” cupcakes with white chocolate chips and whipped cream with a little bit of strawberry jam to stabilize it.

And the yumminess didn’t stop there.  Here’s a run-down of the strawberry feasting that I’ve been doing:

• oatmeal (stone cut) with brown sugar, Straus milk, and strawberries
• strawberry shortcake!  Christina aka Plum Puddin’ shared some shortcake that she made.  Yummy!)
• sesame bagel with cream cheese and… strawberries.  A better bagel would have improved this greatly, but what can you do when you haven’t moved back to NY yet?  The bagel matters less when you’ve got yummy strawberries.
• strawberry lime ice cream!  This is my new favorite flavor of ice cream.  I made a double batch because I knew that it would be yummy and one batch wouldn’t be enough.  To get the lime flavor, I steeped the lime zest in the milk/cream and macerated the strawberries in lime juice.
• strawberry sorbet
• just plain strawberries.  Ha, “just” strawberries.  “Just” the most delicious and lovingly picked strawberries ever!
• brownies with whipped cream and strawberries

The strawberries would have also made great smoothies and milk shakes.  And Mark aka Huckleberry Pie and I love getting donuts and slicing them in half and putting sliced strawberries inside and eating it like a sweet sandwich.  Tim aka Philbert Wormly III (sorry, the Strawberry shortcake world is like the inverse of the Smurfs world with very few male characters and mostly female characters, so I had to resort to using the worm) says that he’s going to make strawberry milk (milk blended with strawberries and maybe a little sugar).  That sounds really yummy too!

My fruity friends, it sounds like we’re going to have to go pick more strawberries!

Games and chores in a cake made of strawberry?
Strawberry Shortcake, wouldn’t ya know.