Having realized that summer is over and that I mostly squandered it, I usually spend early September desperately trying to squeeze in all the summer activities I was too lazy to do in June, July and August. This means finding excuses to put on a swimsuit, refusing to go to any bar that doesn’t have a patio, and frantically eating all the late-summer produce I can get my hands on.
No late-summer produce is dearer to me than strawberries, and no strawberry recipe more sweetly evokes the soon-to-disappear insouciance of summer than strawberry shortcake. Whipped cream is pure frivolity (like “Get Lucky,” only edible), and soft, ripe strawberries embody summer sultriness like no other foodstuff. Meanwhile, the biscuits that form shortcakes’ base are springy as a diving board and light as a sundress, and their buttery flavor portends the one good thing about autumn, which is that it whets the appetite for rich food.
There’s not much shortcake-specific to say about biscuits, except that I’ve chosen to use yogurt instead of buttermilk for practical reasons. Even though shortcakes are a dessert, you can’t make biscuits too sweet — add too much sugar to the dough and they’ll melt into a cookie-biscuit hybrid — so plan on compensating in two ways: First, sprinkle sugar on top of the biscuits before baking them. Second, make sure your strawberry and cream fillings are sweet enough to offset the blandness of the biscuits.
Flavor balance is not the only reason you need to add a little sugar to your strawberries: You want to soften them up a little too. Unless every single strawberry in your package is perfectly tender and juice-laden — and, let’s be honest, that never happens — you’ll want to macerate them with sugar and a little acid to tenderize them and simulate juiciness. You can use lemon juice for the acid; I like balsamic vinegar for its syrupy depth.
