My mom and I realized that it's been WAY to long since my last Bake it, Make it & Take it post. Almost a month, in fact. To be honest, it's been so hot here lately that I haven't really wanted to bake anything. The hot and humid streak we had going on broke last night with a few storm fronts that swept through. If every day could be like today, I'd be in heaven! The perfect temperature, no humidity.....I even sat outside today on my deck to shoot the tutorial I just released today for my Stampin' Mama Tutorial Program. It was so perfect that I felt like turning my oven on because I was in the mood for something no summer can be without.
So....what did I bake today?
Why, Strawberry Shortcake, of course!
With strawberries just coming into season, this is the perfect time for baking up a batch of homemade buttermilk biscuits and serving them up with fresh, juicy strawberries.
My mom (Donna, from Spatulas, Suitcases & Corkscrews) created the most amazing buttermilk biscuit recipe EVER. I also love her recipe for fluffy homemade whipped cream (which is so easy to make!). You can check out her recipe here: Strawberry Shortcake.
I doubled the recipe and got 24 biscuits...and made sure to buy extra strawberries so that we'd have round two for dessert tomorrow night. (Oh....and for breakfast, I ate a couple biscuits with butter and strawberry jam right after they came out of the oven this morning!) Wednesday night is poker night here at the house with my brother, hubby, brother-in-law and grandfather (and they've even got me playing now!) and I always make sure to have something yummy on hand for dessert. Everyone loved it and I even sent my brother and grandfather home with an extra helping in a little container so they could have a round two of their own tomorrow.
When I was thinking about baking these biscuits yesterday, I had planned to bring some over to our neighbors. They're a cute young couple that bring us fresh farm eggs every now and then and I show up with treats on their doorstep when I bake. They brought over some eggs last night and today, I stopped over and handed them the cute package of biscuits you see in this post.
I did a couple things different with the recipe so I thought I'd tell you about them before I get into telling you about the packaging.
1) I didn't have any buttermilk on hand so I used 4 teaspoons of lemon juice (for a double batch) to my 1 1/2 cups of regular milk. This sours the milk when you let it stand for about 15 or so minutes and creates your own homemade buttermilk. You couldn't even tell the difference!
2) Because I doubled the recipe and my food processor is rather on the smallish side, I didn't use the food process at all. Instead, I cut my cold butter into more like shavings and then mixed the dough by hand, making sure to rub handfuls of the mixture to break up the butter and shortening into the mixture.
3) I was too lazy roll out the dough onto my counter and make a mess with flour all over the place, so I rolled balls of dough in my hand and then flattened them out a bit to make a round biscuit shape. Much less clean up this way and they still fluffed up very nicely.
So....on to the packaging. I couldn't really package up the strawberries (though I'm sure I could have found a way if I wanted to go that far), so I chose to package up just the biscuits and give them to our neighbors with a tag on the front explaining what to do with them.
I stacked 4 biscuits in a tall cellophane bag and tied it off with a pretty ribbon. I didn't want the biscuits to just be sitting in the bag without it looking all nice and colorful, so I made my own crinkle grass to go inside the bag. I cut some strips of Pretty in Pink and Certainly Celery and ran them through (three at a time) my crimper tool. I rolled them all together to create a ball and then flattened it out a bit and placed it at the bottom of the bag and stacked the biscuits on top. I love making my own custom made crinkle grass. I never have to worry about having crinkle grass that doesn't match and the paper grass doesn't get all over the place like that plastic grass does. Also, it's a great way to use up those long, thin strips of cardstock that you're hanging onto but don't quite know what to do with.
I wanted to create a tag that had some strawberries on it but realized that I don't own not even ONE strawberry stamp! Not one! I started thinking about what I could use to improvise and found exactly what I needed in one of Kitchen Sink Stamps' newest sets. I used the image that looks like a finial from the Plaid Plus set and turned it upside down to make it look like a strawberry (with Regal Rose ink). I then used one of the small swirled accent images in Wild Wasabi to serve as the stem on top of the strawberry.
On the front of the tag, I used one of the long plaid-maker images from the set and crossed it in the bottom right corner going vertically and horizontally with Pretty in Pink ink.
The new Other Important People stamp set came in VERY handy for the greeting on the tag. Both the words, "fantastic" and "neighbor," came from that set. And because the Whole Family set matches the font used in the Other Important People set, I could use the "For" without it looking like it didn't belong with the other words.
I created a border of strawberries on the back of the tag, along with directions on what to do with the biscuits in the bag.
The striped/polka-dotted ribbon came from a big box of ribbon that my friend (and muse), Jen, sent me. That ribbon is what gave me the inspiration for the colors that I used with this project. I used a piece of Moss gingham ribbon through the hole on the tag and then tied and secured onto the top of the bag.
If you wanted to do the whole shebang, you could tuck this cute package of biscuits in a basket with a pint of fresh picked strawberries and a can of whipped cream (since it would be hard to put a tub of homemade whipped cream in the basket). It's a great gift to bring along to a BBQ so that the host and hostess can have it the next night.
Here's the link for the recipe again: Strawberry Shortcake
Writing about all of this makes me hungry for round two tonight! Is it tomorrow yet???
Happy Creating!
-Stampin' Mama
I'm on a patriotic kick this week! Of course, with stamp sets like the new Playful Stars set, it's easy to come up with great ideas!
The greeting is from the new Ready 4 Any Holiday set. I stamped this on a scrap piece of Real Red cardstock with Versamark ink and embossed it with Black embossing powder. I cut above and below the greeting with a pair of pinking edge scissors. This got popped up on the Whisper White cardstock with pop-dots, as well. 
