Strawberries aren’t supposed to be in season yet.  Even so, I found them for great prices at the supermarket.  Now what goes well with strawberries…. champagne and chocolate is the first things to come to mind.  Since I’ve had my fill in enough chocolate recipes, I decided to lean towards wine.

Browsed around for a recipe and found a perfect one from Jenna’s blog of Moscato Strawberry Shortcakes!  She uses Moscato wine instead of champagne and that works perfectly fine with me.  Moscato is a sweet sparkling wine made from muscat grapes.  It’s really more of a dessert wine in my opinion.  My favorite brands so far have been Castello del Poggio and Paolo Saracco.  Barefoot was mediocre, so I don’t mind using it for cooking or cocktails.  Also, in Jenna’s recipe, I didn’t want to use store-bought biscuits, so I also looked up a recipe for shortcakes, which I adapted from Alton Brown at Food Network.

Ingredients:

For shortcake:

2 cups flour

4 tsp baking powder

3/4 tsp salt

1 tbsp sugar

2 tbsp butter

2 tbsp shortening

3/4 cup half and half

melted butter to brush shortcakes

For strawberry sauce:

2 pint fresh strawberries, quartered

3 tbsp Moscato wine

2-3 tbsp powdered sugar, depending on how sweet your berries are

juice from 1/2 lemon

For whipped cream:

1 pint heavy whipping cream, very cold

2 tbsp powdered sugar

1 tbsp Moscato wine

Directions:

Make the biscuits:

Heat oven to 450° degrees F.

In a large mixing bowl, combine flour, baking powder, salt and sugar.  But in butter and shortening.  Mix in half-and-half.  Split the mixture into 8 equal portions onto a baking sheet.  Brush with melted butter and sprinkle with sugar.  Bake for 15 minutes or until brown.

Make the strawberry sauce:

Place the quartered strawberries with the Moscato wine in a large skillet over medium heat.  Add the powdered sugar and lemon juice and stir well.  Bring mixture to a simmer and cook for 20 minutes.  The strawberry sauce should be nice and thick with most of the strawberries broken down.  Remove from heat.  It will continue to thicken as it cools slightly.

Make the whipped cream:

Whip the cream with the powdered sugar and wine until soft peaks appear.

Assemble the shortcakes, split a biscuit open.  Spoon strawberry sauce on top of one half with a big dollop of whipped cream.  Top with other biscuit half and more whipped cream.

Serve immediately.

Print Recipe Here!

It’s a mountain high dessert but surprisingly light because of the fresh fruit and whipped cream.  And the shortcake is essentially a biscuit.  It would be perfect for breakfast with just a dab of butter, as my friend suggested.

She came over to visit after a late dinner at Pizza Schmeatza with me.  They serve gourmet pizza toppings.  My favorite is the Sch’meat’za, which has crumbled Italian sausage, german sausage, canadian-style bacon, genoa salami and pepperoni.  Who doesn’t love a slice of all meat pizza. (Sorry to the vegetarians out there…)

Anyway, since I had this opened bottle of Moscato, I just had to make cocktails and have some with a friend.

Found this cocktail recipe developed by Kim Haasarud called Moscato Minuet.  A white sangria with orange and sweet citrus flavors.

Ingredients:

1 oz Grand Marnier or mandarin or orange vodka

2 strawberries, sliced

1 orange wheel and orange slices

4 mint leaves

1 oz orange juice

4 oz Moscato

Lemon squeeze

Directions:

Combine all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker.  Top with ice and shake vigorously.  Pour contents into a wine goblet and serve.

Print Recipe Here!

We definitely had a good time last night.  Thanks, P, for a short but great night!