Strawberryland, A Trip Down Memory Lane

So, I’ve been trying to write this post for weeks…Between work and freelance and life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness it’s been tough to find the time to write, edit, polish Pegleg, etc. So without further ado, I present a Strawberry Shortcake journey…

Gluten Free Frannie is one of my co-workers. It was her birthday this past week, and if you can’t tell by her name, she has Celiac. Since we couldn’t pick anything up from the neighborhood bakery that she could eat, I decided to try my hand at something special for Frannie. Frannie had mentioned how she really wanted a gluten free strawberry shortcake for her birthday, but her mom couldn’t find one. A light bulb went off in my head – I can make a strawberry shortcake. After all, Strawberry Shortcake was one of my favorite cartoons growing up. I had Strawberry Shortcake sheets and curtains AND it was awesome (especially because I was about 5). So I honed in on my inner child and started doing some Strawberry Shortcake research.

Growing up, when we had strawberry shortcake, it was made with pound cake. So I figured that’s how I’d make it. Upon further research, I found that “traditional” strawberry shortcake is made with biscuits. I’m not down with things that are too traditional, so I went with the pound cake anyway.

The elusive pound cake – one of my favorite desserts growing up. One of the first recipes I ever made on my own was a lemon pound cake with a sugar lemon glaze from the Joy of Cooking. Traditional pound cake requires – a pound of butter, sugar, flour, and eggs, in a loaf pan; it sounds pretty intense, but is ridiculously delicious. However, to make it without gluten proved to be more difficult than originally imagined.

So I found some recipes. Most of them were made in a Bundt cake pan, which totally goes against any sort of pound cake in my book – so those were out. Then there were the ones that were complicated, with at least 7 different kinds of flours and crazy pan techniques. Finally, I settled on a recipe I found on The Art of Gluten Free Cooking Blog. The first try, I followed the recipe to a T, and while it tasted good, it was not perfect. So then I tried it again, with some minor recipe substitutions and it came out way better. It doesn’t taste like the pound cakes of my childhood, but it was a great substitute. It was light, a little crumbly, and not as heavy. The one thing I would NOT recommend changing is using a good quality butter. I used Kerry Gold Unsalted Irish butter. It’s not cheap, but there are so few ingredients in a pound cake it makes it worthwhile to use the best.

So here’s the original recipe:
Pound Cake – Take One
2 Sticks + 2 Tablespoons Unsalted Butter, good quality – don’t skimp!
1 ¼ Cup Granulated Sugar
4 Large Eggs
2 ½ Teaspoons Pure Vanilla Extract
1 Cup Sweet Sorghum Flour
½ Cup Corn Starch
½ Cup Tapioca Flour
½ Teaspoon Baking Powder
¼ Teaspoon Kosher Salt
Zest of 1 Lemon

Preheat oven to 325°F then butter a 9 x 5” bread pan and set aside on top of two cookie sheets.

Cream together the butter and sugar on high speed for five whole minutes. While the butter is creaming, whisk together the flours, baking powder and salt. Then grate the lemon zest right into the dry ingredients and set aside. After your five minutes is up, add the eggs, one at a time, being sure to whip for a full minute after each addition, scraping down the sides of the bowl and the paddle as needed.

Once the eggs are fully incorporated, lower the mixer speed to medium and add Vanilla extract and then the dry ingredients all at once and rotate for three to five minutes more. Then the batter looks very aerated and is the color of clean limestone, it is ready. (However, my batter didn’t come out looking like limestone, but it was smooth.) Pour the batter into your prepared pan and bake at 325°F for 50-60 minutes or when a knife inserted into the middle comes our clean. After 25 minutes of baking, check on your pound cake. If it has begun to darken rather quickly, loosely cover with an aluminum tent and resume baking.

Here’s where I think I went wrong – my butter was a little too cold. I don’t feel like it creamed well enough. At 325 degrees the cake took about 2 hours to cook. It was a long wait, and not one I had anticipated. The cake didn’t dump well – at all – or in one piece. It was really frustrating.
For Pound Cake – Take 2 – the cake came out much butter.

Here’s what changed:
First, I sprayed the loaf pan with cooking spray, instead of just using the butter on the pan.
I used all the same ingredients, except for the Corn Starch, I substituted Potato Starch for it. It gave it a similar texture only a little better. I melted all my butter before creaming anything. I also bumped up the oven heat to 350 degrees. The cake only took an hour and ten minutes which was much more reasonable.
For the strawberries:

Slice two cartons of strawberries. Put them in a bowl and add about a ¼ cup of sugar to them. Stir up the strawberries and let them marinate. They will get juicy and slightly sweet.
To serve – Cut a slice and spoon the strawberries over it. Add a little whipped cream to top it off.

The pound cakes, while good, did not taste like ‘traditional’ pound cake. It definitely needs an embellishment – strawberries, ice cream, citrus glaze, etc. But I would make it again and thank goodness I figured out how to cut down the cooking time!