strawberries!

A few weeks ago I was checking out at Publix and saw on the cover of April's Southern Living this multi-layered strawberry-bonanza of a dessert.  I promptly decided, "oh I need to make that."  I got home, thought about it a bit more, then forgot.  THEN, a blogger I follow posted how she made it, and she posted a recipe and some tips.  Donesies.

On Easter weekend I bought the ingredients, and knew this recipe wasn't playing around...16 oz. marscapone, 4 cups of heavy whipping cream, almost a dozen eggs, etc.  On Easter Sunday at church I was telling my good friends the M's about it, and asked if they'd want some if it was good (fortunately, they did).  I got home, Z came over, and we got to cooking.  Meringues.  Filling.  Cutting berries.

It was my first time baking meringues, and didn't realize they needed almost 4 hours in the oven.  That bumped dinner plans of making a tart so we went and grabbed a burger, got in touch with the M's, and went out to their house to share.  And by "went out" I mean we got there as fast as possible.

One thing about the dessert was that height (and let's be honest, calorically) is ginormous.  I didn't want to waste any or have the meringues melt, so I cut the meringues into pieces (the meringues having been taste-test approved), layered some filling (bowl-licked clean taste-test approved) and berries, then topped with another meringue and berries.  OMG.

I also played around with my own recipe this week.  I had a decent amount of whipping cream left, and some berries that were too soft to eat and enjoy, but not bad enough to throw away.  I had biscuits on the brain, so I found a basic drop biscuit recipe from Joy, washed and mashed up the berries & added a bit of vanilla and let them sit, made up the biscuit dough, added a heaping spoonful of powdered sugar, added the berries, dropped, and baked.  While they were baking I whipped up the cream and added a tiny bit of powdered sugar to it.  I didn't take a picture of them with the good camera because I was too busy eating them, so I just got an instragram pic.

It was like strawberry shortcake, but less messy and less time consuming.  I'm a fan.