bb cake w/strawberries & cream
+ thoughts on butter & ai
new on bbs
Brown Butter Strawberry Shortcake
Brown butter (pound-like) cake made strawberry shortcake style. One layer, sliced into four then stacked with creamy vanilla bean cream and fresh, juicy berries so each slice gets a total of 8 layers =)
Strawberry Bread
Strawberries slow roasted to produced a pronounced flavor in a super moist quick bread.
Strawberry Sorbet
Silky smooth and intensely strawberry sorbet. This recipe uses just four ingredients and can be made with an ice cream machine or a food processor.
Lemon Strawberry Icebox Cake
Easy & no bake: shortbread cookies layered with fresh berries, lemon curd and cream cheese whipped cream. Optional: a toasted meringue on top ;-)
toasted meringue tops:
S’mores Pie
Graham cracker crust, a dark chocolate ganache layer, and a tall, fluffy vanilla meringue that’s toasted like a mallow.
From the (late) May Archives
2025: Strawberry Curd & Strawberry Tart
2024: Baklava Cheesecake (No Bake) & Rhubarb Upside Down Cake
2023: Brown Butter Vanilla Cupcakes & Double Mint Chocolate Chip Cookies
2022: S’mores Pie & Chocolate Cheesecake with Hazelnut Oreo Crust
2021: Lemon Baklava Pie & Homemade PB Cup Stuffed Cookies (we make our own pb cups!)
2020: Small Birthday Cake & Unicorn Cheesecake
reader review
“PERFECTION! Keep the ice cream recipes coming! I finally found a recipe that doesn’t have ice crystal upon eating….the secret ALL HEAVY CREAM! No milk…..what a difference. I’ve made it twice in a week! Hey, strawberry season is upon us soon!” Karen on Orange Ice Cream (p.s. I am testing strawberry ice cream this week!!)
reads
“The supermarket strawberry, as opposed to the wild strawberry or the roadside strawberry, allows Irish-grown fruit to reach people who may never pass a Wexford roadside stall. It extends the season and gives the strawberry a place in ordinary weekly shopping of us all. But something is inevitably lost when a fruit of journey and place becomes a product of constant availability for most of the year. The roadside strawberry tasted of where it was bought, or at least, that how I imagined it. The supermarket strawberry tastes more often of the system that delivers it to us on a weekly basis.” On Strawberries, Wexford, Wild Fruit, and the Taste of an Irish Summer, Investigations of Irish Food.
“[Ida] Huddleston was offered $60,000 an acre for her 71-acre property, while Bare declined a $48,000-an-acre offer for her 463-acre farm, according to LEX18. Together, those offers add up to more than $26 million, a figure most families would struggle to ignore. But Huddleston’s answer has stayed plain. “I don’t want your money, I don’t need your money,” she told LEX 18, later adding, “I’m staying put.” [Delsia] Bare has also raised concerns that the company behind the project has not been publicly identified, saying that secrecy matters when people are deciding “what you’re going to do with the rest of your life.” The family’s land is part of a 1,200-acre Mason County farm that has been worked for generations. For them, the offer is not just a business deal. It is a request to trade soil, cattle, memories, and future harvests for a one-time check.” A mother and daughter near Maysville turned down $26 million to sell farmland for a data center, and their blunt reason is that feeding the country matters more than a tech buyer paying roughly 10 times the land’s farm value, ECOnews.
“With baking, I’m stricter, at least with the weights. I usually follow grams closely and read the method carefully, unless it’s something I’m very familiar with and confident about — in that case, I might not read the method at all. However, with both cooking and baking, I recognize that when I just scan the ingredient list and method, I’m most likely not tasting the dish or bake as it was meant to be, and every time I make it I’m getting a slightly different result. Overall, I believe that if a recipe is new to you, following it closely is important, and using weight measurements is more precise. If you know the recipe well you can lean on intuition more, but for consistent results precision is your ally. In short, precision guides you, but it’s not the whole story. Intuition matters too. To build intuition, and with it confidence, you need repetition and practice.” Precision and Intuition in Cooking and Baking, My Half Apulian Table
notes
on butter: I have been meaning tell you about my butter troubles for awhile and now that we’ve got a (brown) butter focused recipe I thought it imperative. People often ask me what brands I use so they can exactly replicate my recipes, and it has changed over the years. Pre-pandemic, when I was asked, it was trader joe’s brand; it was inexpensive and worked well. Post-pandemic, I started noticing that when I would slice a stick, the knife wouldn’t glide down, instead the butter would start to crumble. Some conversations with fellow bakers confirmed this was happening to them too and we figured out it was a higher water percentage and less butterfat. I then switched to costco’s brand and was happy with it for a short while, until I started noticing the same issue. I then turned to whole food’s 365, and used it for about two years. I still think it’s fine in terms of butterfat, but what led me to turn off it as well was this: I would weigh my sticks, sans wrapper, and find they were not 113g (as advertised) but 110-111g. Here’s a video showing me weighing one, scraping off what was on the wrapper just in case that was the issue and then weighing the wrapper:
As someone who pays attention to the minute grams when it comes to butter, I felt a bit deceived and started looking for a new butter brand. I had always heard good things about land o’lakes but was discouraged by the price (I am a firm believer in no more than a dollar per stick!) until I found it within my budget via amazon fresh. So far, I am happy: it weighs what it says it does (113g) and my knife is gliding down against a silky stickm the way it should. You might wonder why I don’t just switch to european butter (most people extol kerrygold) and by now one reason might be obvious, it’s expensive. Also, I don’t always want that high of a butterfat percentage as it won’t be noticed (eg. cakes, brownies) or it can make things like buttercream far too soft. I do, however, reach for big butterfat when I want to make richer tasting cookies, or when I’m making flaky pastries and want that lovely butter flavor front and center. My recent buttersearch has led me to start using danish creamery, which I learned has 85% butterfat, the highest I’ve seen (for comparison, kerrygold is 82-83%). Though I’d only suggest it for those special bakes - it’s quite pricey.
on ai: every once in a fantastical while, a recipe of mine will be the first result someone sees when they google a baking term. This is every blogger’s dream because it means more people will land on your page and actually make your recipe. For a short while when one searched brown butter cake they would land, inexplicably - but it made me so happy, where far too many everyday cakes live. I had developed that one after EBC’s success and it took around five trials to get it just so. Alas, earlier this week I saw that now when you search, the first thing you’ll see is gemeni’s “ai overview”; an explanation of a brown butter cake (which tbh reads like a brain dead bot wrote it specifically for seo purposes, ugggh). It also gives you a recipe which is quite similar to mine, but with almost double the sugar and a bit more flour (no other changes, eh??). It tells you to bake it in a 9x13’ pan; and well, that would be a rather thin cake, imo. I also took issue with it offering buttermilk or sour cream in the ingredients as if these are interchangeable: there is more water and a lot less fat in buttermilk and the resulting crumb would be quite different depending on which you used. The only thing that I took solace in was that gemeni “cited” me (there’s a link to mine next to the buttermilk/sour cream abomination):
Then, a day later I had googled ‘history of strawberry shortcake’ (before I share a recipe I like to know something about it’s origins) and a first result was a page from a site called ‘baking heritage’. I clicked on the page and before I got to reading, noticed the images looked ai generated. Sure enough, at the top theres’ a tab called “superbaker ai”. Turns out it’s a ‘recipe generator’ where you can select the ingredients you want to use, how much time you have, and your level of baking. Based your input it will design a recipe. I wanted to gag (but also cry, lol) as I read through this but I thought I’d see if it too would bring up something familiar: I selected the ingredients I use in my brown butter cake and said I was an “intermediate” baker with just one hour. It gave a recipe that is almost an exact replica of my cake with just one singular change: an extra 1/4 cup of sugar. And in it’s sourcing notes, it cited itself: “This recipe draws inspiration from the ‘Small-Batch Brown Butter Banana Bread’ on Baking Heritage, which also showcases the deep, nutty character of brown butter in a moist, comforting bake.” I repeated asking it to generate with the same input and each time it offered a smaller or larger version of a “sour cream brown butter cake”, citing it’s own banana bread as it’s inspo. I share all of this with you for two reasons: partially I hope you understand what recipe developers are dealing with when it comes to ai. We value and cherish our work very deeply (I for one am thankful every day that I get to do this for a living); so to see it recycled in such a way is very disheartening, not to mention concerning for our ability to continue in this space. But moreso, I just hope that people see this for what it is: slop or stolen work, under the guise of accessibility and convenience. These recipes are not tested by a human, there’s very little guarantee it would work. The pictures that accompany them are not at all a representation of what you would get if you made that recipe because well, it isn’t real.
I hate ending newsletters on a somber note so I’ll tell you what gives me hope: you. All +6k of you who subscribe to this newsletter to hear about my work. I recognize and appreciate that you are here looking for a trustworthy source of inspiration, and I in turn promise to always be that for you whether it takes me two or 10 tries (thinking of that ridicouluos roulade now - btw yes it was my oven after all!) to get it just right for you.
sam