use real butter

I don’t usually buy a lot of peaches and plums and nectarines, just because Jeremy doesn’t dig on drupes and it’s cheaper to buy fruit we both eat. But when they are on sale, I’ll hazard a few from time to time. Sometimes I will pick a few up from a farmer’s market when they are really fragrant and absolutely juicy ripe. Well, I fell sucker to a sale at Safeway recently and when I bit into one raw (because that is my favorite way to enjoy fruit), it was just a touch grainy. So I looked around for a recipe to use up the rest of the nectarines. Most recipes are listed for peaches and not nectarines, so I found: Georgia peach cobbler, Georgia peach bread, Georgia peach tea cake, Georgia peach muffins, Georgia peach this and Georgia peach that. Just in case you were wondering where peaches are grown…

There is an almost floral flavor to ripe, fresh strawberries that screams summer to me. And while it isn’t my favorite fruit, I find it to be a beautiful fruit and a nice one to work with. When I want the really authentic flavor of strawberries in a dessert, I try to buy organic, and if not organic… in the old days, I bought from farmer’s markets like Pasadena *sigh*.

Yesterday I topped and washed and froze two pounds of berries.

I had an extra vanilla chiffon cake from class and decided I’d use it for dessert this weekend when we had friends over for dinner. I normally like to work with chocolate despite my indifference toward it, but this time I wanted to try something orthogonal… something strawberry.

Originally I wanted to layer the cake with pastry cream and then frost in strawberry buttercream, but pastry cream can misbehave if it gets warm. I began the previous night washing the strawberries and setting them out to dry completely. First I wanted to do some garnishes, just for fun.