A Most Magnificent Shortcake

S ome people stockpile toilet paper. Others believe ice cream is a shopping-trip must-have. My motto? Always have heavy cream in the fridge. From savory dishes to sweet, a little bit of this magical ingredient goes a long way by adding richness and silkiness wherever it may be needed. Add a dash to your coffee and feel decadent. Combine it with gelatin and raspberries to make a spectacular mousse. Whip up a batch and include a tablespoon of sour cream, and you have a tangy treat to dollop on any number of fruit desserts.

For sibling No. 7, it’s the star ingredient in his yearly birthday-treat request: strawberry shortcake.

My mom and I have come up with various iterations of the dessert, sometimes using store-bought pound cake (thank you, Sam’s Club and the freezer section at Kroger), and at other times, we’ve tossed together homemade biscuits. That, you see, is part of strawberry shortcake’s charm. Whether you choose a sweet or neutral bread component, they function the same way: as a vehicle for the fruit and cream.

Pound cake is decidedly delicious, but biscuits have been our base of choice in recent years. And there are quite a number of variations from which to choose. First, there’s the fat. Will you use butter, lard, or heavy cream? Then there’s sugar: to add or not to add? Don’t forget your wet ingredients. Will you use milk or buttermilk? But the decisions don’t end there. Now, how will you bake the dough? Scoop and drop? Treat it like puff pastry? Cut out circles with a drinking glass?

Since I was the designated baker this birthday, circular, butter-based biscuits sprinkled with some raw sugar were the selection. Topped with sliced strawberries and freshly made whipped cream, this shortcake went down easy. Which would’ve been the end of it, except for the memory it gave me of a funny picture book from my childhood.

Enter Cook-a-Doodle-Doo! by Janet Stevens and Susan Stevens Crummel, a hilarious spin-off of The Little Red Hen. We must’ve read this book countless times aloud to each other growing up, and it was amusing to give each character a distinct voice.

There’s Rooster, a new but confident cook, who struts his way into the farmhouse to concoct a fabulous strawberry shortcake from the cookbook of his great-grandmother, the Little Red Hen. He, like the original chicken of yore, asks other animals for assistance, but the first three turn him down. Undaunted, he’s about to continue without them, when three more arrive, eager to help. Methodical Turtle, over-eager Iguana, and ravenous Pot-Bellied Pig are champing at the bit to aid Rooster, and they set to with a will.

The book’s artwork, done by Janet Stevens, is undeniably funny. How she managed to get such expressions on a pig is astonishing, and watching the absurd Iguana misunderstand the recipe’s directions on page after page is delightful. The humor comes through in the writing, too, with word play, repetitive admonishments, and poor Pig’s desperate desire to taste anything.

Oftentimes, books centered around food will include the recipe at the end, and that’s the case with Cook-a-Doodle-Doo! With plenty of cream and strawberries still in the fridge, and with the promise to bring dessert to a friend’s home that evening, I set out to “make the most wonderful, magnificent strawberry shortcake in the whole wide world.”

I do struggle to make it through any recipe without changing, adding, or substituting something, and this recipe proved to be no exception. In my defense, however, I made only one substitution: buttermilk instead of regular milk in the cake. In my humble opinion, it added even more depth to an already lovely recipe. Post baking, whipping, and slicing, I managed to evenly split the cake into two layers and proceeded to stack all the ingredients into a reasonably stable (and stubby) tower. After covering the cake with foil, I packed it up — along with the extra whipped cream and strawberries — for the quick trip to my friend’s . . . which turned into an hour-plus drive due to horrendous traffic. So much for driving with the windows down. My poor cake needed all the help the A/C could give it.

After much maneuvering and no swearing (I promise, mom!), my destination was reached, and I was greeted by a large group of children — many of whom are or have been my students. They gathered around the table as, with great trepidation, I unveiled the cake, certain it had melted or collapsed by this point.

Miracle of miracles, it had held together.

Topping it all off, this family hadn’t heard of Cook-a-Doodle-Doo!, so while the youngest set were digging in with gusto, and between bites of my own slice, I read it to them.

And if you look carefully at this article’s lead image, you can see a small cake section missing. Quality control, you see, is just as important in real life as it is in Stevens and Crummel’s charming tale.