Summer. Opening the door early in the morning, I’m enveloped in warm, balmy air. Light floral fragrances sweeten pathways through the garden.
Families flock to nearby beaches. In town, an elevated mood prevails. The long wait for the warmth and sunshine of summer has heightened the exhilaration at its arrival.
An odd request. Not long ago I received one of the more unusual questions a reader of this column has ever asked: With berry season coming up, do you have a good recipe for biscuits or scones that would make a good base for berry shortcakes?
The request took my back to the time when I always had a large jar of home-make biscuit mix on hand in the fridge. Adding a little milk to a portion of the mix was all that was needed to create biscuits. Variations on sweet and savoury additions, depending on the occasion, were endless.
The children loved the slightly sweetened biscuits, cut in half, with fresh berries and whipped cream piled on top.
This year, the strawberry patch and its delicious bounty brought on a hankering for repeating those family delights, but I no longer had on hand a familiar, reliable recipe for the biscuit base.
A friend gave me a recipe for “English Scones.” It called for the usual flour, sugar, baking powder salt and butter, with buttermilk as the liquid and the addition of lemon zest.
Never having met a recipe I didn’t want to tinker with, I scrabbled around online sites and ended up using a combination of my friend’s recipe and one I found. The result turned out to be exactly what I wanted.
Scones for Shortcake
Stir together:
2 cups flour (I used half spelt, half unbleached white)
1/4 cup sugar
2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
Blend in with fingers:
1/3 cup cold butter, in pieces. Add zest of one lemon.
Beat together and add to dry ingredients:
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla
1/2 cup milk or cream
Mix with a fork, then knead into a ball. Place the dough on a cookie sheet or pizza pan and flatten it into a two-cm thick circle. Cut into six triangles. Separate them slightly and brush the tops with cream or milk. Bake at 375 F for 15 to 18 minutes, until browned.
Because I had extra berries, this year, I tried making a spiced strawberry sauce, cooking sliced berries down into sauce consistency with a little water, slivered candied ginger, and a liberal sprinkling of cinnamon with sugar to taste. To make a shortcake, I used this sauce to spread over a warm, split scone before spooning whipped cream and then fresh, sliced strawberries over top. Best strawberry shortcake ever, with a little family nostalgia thrown in.
Weird weather. Weird plants. Last summer, plants shrivelled and fried in the heat. This year, most plantings are lagging behind schedule from prolonged cold weather and heavy rainfall through the spring.
It is interesting, and sometimes disconcerting, to observe plant reactions to deviant weather. In my garden a curved row of lavender plants edging a little flower bed has ballooned into twice the plants’ usual size, almost completely taking over the limited space.
Petunia varieties I grow in bowl-shaped planters on the patio have always maintained a neatly spreading habit, until this year. The stems are pointing straight up. Perhaps, if warm weather persists, they’ll relax and settle down into their usual form.
Most astounding have been clumps of Astrantia (masterwort) that have maintained modest proportions, for many years, in a bed beside two hydrangeas. This summer, they are a broadly billowing cloud of pincushion-like blooms being visited by flitting bees.
How did this happen? I suppose cool, rainy weather triggered an explosion of growth.
I first came across Astrantia in a little colour booklet of cut flowers from the Flower Council of Holland. I was enchanted with the starry little flowers, and set about acquiring a few varieties. Most grow 60 to 90 cm tall, with divided, maple-like leaves and showy little blooms in white through green and shades of pink and rose to red.
Several attempts to grow the plants from seed failed, until this year, when a seeding of Astrantia major ‘Primadonna’ (Plant World Seeds) yielded two (so far) nice seedlings.
