Spring Strawberries

Last night, in return for borrowing the tiller for our flowerbed project the previous evening, I made a new recipe for Strawberry Shortcake Cookies to take across the street to our neighbors Bill and Lorie.

The first step was to dice the strawberries, and then mix them with a little lemon juice and sugar. That mixture along was delicious. :-)

These cubes of butter are what put the short in shortcake.

My pastry blender is frequently used in my kitchen. I always get impatient, though, and don't get the butter mixed into the flour quite as much as I should, and that results in some cookies running at the edges when they hit the oven.

After the butter is cut in, add the cream. I ended up using a full two cups instead of the 1 1/3 cup the recipe called for, because the batter still seemed dry. Fold in the strawberries as the next step.

And drop the cookies on a greased baking sheet. The recipe called for parchment-lined, but I've had bad luck with parchment in the past, so I just grease the pans.

And the final product cooled on the counter before the prettiest ones were packaged to give away. After the first pan came out of the oven, I learned that the cookies spread quite a bit, so to give them plenty of space on the pans. Also, they might not have spread quite as much if they didn't have so many strawberries. But nonetheless, they did taste good!