Strawberry Shortcake

This is strawberry shortcake, and it rocks. The recipe is from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World, but it’s hidden among many suggested variations. Isa also has a strawberry shortcake in Vegan With a Vengeance, but it’s a totally different recipe and the creme part is made from macadamia nuts, which make my throat swell shut (one day you’ll all get the low down on the plight of a vegan with nut allergies, but not today). Devin and Caiti, my vegan sensei’s, came over for dinner on Saturday, so I decided to knock their socks off with these.

Ingredients:

Strawberries:

3-4 cups strawberries sliced thin

1/2 cup maple syrup

Cupcakes:

1 cup soy milk

1 tsp apple cider vinegar

1 1/4 cups flour

2 tbsp cornstarch

3/4 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp baking soda

1/2 tsp salt

1/3 cup canola oil

3/4 cup sugar

2 1/4 tsp vanilla extract

Creme:

1/2 cup vegetable shortening

1/2 cup earth balance butter

3 1/2 cups powdered sugar

1/4 cup soy milk

1 1/2 tsp vanilla extract

Start with the strawberries. Thinly slice all your strawberries and throw them into a container that gives you room to stir them, and add the maple syrup. The sugar in the maple syrup is going to draw the water out of the strawberries so you’ll get this great maple-strawberry syrup, and the strawberries taste like candy. It’s pretty fantastic. I prepare strawberries like this when I make chocolate chip pancakes as well, it’s super great. That being said, you may not need the full 3 or 4 cups of strawberries, but I tend to eat at least half a cup worth, so it’s good to be prepared.

Now on to the cupcake! I’m sorry to say, this isn’t a shortcake at all. Just a normal vanilla cupcake. But it doesn’t matter because this is still crazy delicious and the vanilla cupcake does it’s job of posing as shortcake beautifully. Preheat the oven to 350 and line your cupcake pan. Add the apple cider vinegar to the soy milk (for those of you who don’t know, the vinegar curdles the milk making the closest replica of buttermilk), leave for a few minutes to curdle. In a medium bowl beat the sugar, oil, extract, and curdled milk. Sift in the cornstarch, flour, baking soda, baking powder, and salt. Mix ’til minimal lumps, but being sure not to over mix is more important than any leftover lumps.

I like to use big cupcake liners that stand up on their own without needing a cupcake pan. They’re big, so you make less, but they’re more like the shnazzy gourmet cupcakes everyone loves so dearly, they’re especially handy for this recipe, because the assembly of the shortcake involves cutting a cone out of the cake and filling it, additionally I like to add strawberries around the top so the big wrappers allow me extra room. They’re just a good call!

Fill your wrappers about halfway and stick them in the oven immediately! I’m super bad about this and I never have my cupcake liners ready and I always risk getting cupcakes that don’t rise properly because the chemical reactions start happening right when that batter gets mixed and if you don’t pop them in a hot place toot sweet you’ll be stuck with flat cupcake patties, a mere shell of what you knew they had the potential to be. Set your timer for 18 minutes-ish.

While the cupcakes cook work on your icing. This can be done using a handheld mixer or a stand mixer, but I always dread the day where I’ll attempt this with a whisk. I used to only own a handheld mixer and making this icing really felt like a chore (even though it was soooo worth it), so when my handheld mixer broke and I went to borrow my neighbors stand mixer I was shocked with how easy this is. Moral of the story: if you have neighbors that own a stand mixer, but never bake, take my advice and borrow it indefinitely.

Now, with your newly acquired stand mixer mix the butter and shortening. Once butter and shortening are fully incorporated, add the powdered sugar on a low speed (otherwise it’ll fly everywhere). Beat until you have something that somewhat resembled powdered sugar gravel. Add milk and extract, and beat for at least 7 minutes AND I’M SUPER SERIOUS ABOUT THIS. My strategy is to beat until you think you’re done and then beat for two minutes more. It has to get lots of air incorporated so it gets all awesome and fluffy. Once it’s done scoop it into a gallon ziploc bag (I tried doing it with my piping tube, but I think I had added too much sugar [which is fine, but the more sugar the stiffer and less malleable the icing] so I ended up siphoning it back into a series of sandwich bags because we were all out of gallon bags. Don’t be like me, always have gallon bags!) and hang out until your cupcakes have come out of the oven and totally cooled.

Now is the super fun part! Once your cupcakes are totally cool (AND I MEAN COOL!) take a spoon or knife and cut, at an angle, a circle in the middle of the cupcake. You don’t want to penetrate the bottom of the cupcake (I bet right now you’ll start wishing you had cool self standing cupcake wrappers that give you tons of room to do this).

Once the cone’s out fill the well you just made with strawberries.

Cut a corner of your ziploc and cover the strawberry well with a dollop of icing. Now stick the cone back on the strawberry well, applying a little pressure so it’ll stay in place. Next I add more strawberries around the perimeter of the cake cone, then cover the perimeter strawberries and the cone part with more big swirls of icing. Top it with some drips of strawberry juice from the bottom of your maple strawberry container, I just drip it with a spoon. You can eat them right then and there, but they’re best refrigerated.

Footnote: I know this is an inopportune time to post this since strawberry season isn’t really anywhere in sight for most of the world, but in the glorious Santa Monica Farmers Market world, the strawberry season just ended, so I was celebrating the end of the almost year round berry harvest. My advice would be to just print this out and tape it to your window so you can dream of the summer day when this’ll rock your world. Or move to Southern California.