This is the story of two baking adventures that took place in my kitchen this morning. Shane went out for a few hours and I wanted to take the opportunity to make this week’s Sweet Melissa Sundays recipe as well as try out my new mini bundt pan and use up some leftover egg whites by making white cake. One of those baking adventures yielded a really delicious, pretty dessert:
and the other one…..well, let’s just say it didn’t go so well. More on that in a bit. But first, this week’s Sweet Melissa Sundays, as you can see, was strawberry shortcake and was selected by Wendy of Pink Stripes. Wendy makes some really amazing things in her kitchen (homemade croissants and danish are a few of my favorites!) so be sure to check out her blog.
I decided to make only a quarter of the recipe this week since I love strawberry shortcake and I didn’t want to have 6 shortcakes in the house tempting me. Quartering the recipe yielded one giant shortcake, which was just enough. The only problem I ran into with the recipe was in making the shortcake. My dough was REALLY crumbly and I had trouble getting it to come together before sticking it in the oven. I was wary of adding too much cream and I didn’t want to overwork the dough so I just kind of pieced it together and hoped for the best. It was definitely still crumbly after it baked but it was amazingly delicious so I didn’t mind.
As delicious as the shortcake was, the macerated strawberries were my absolute favorite. I could have just eaten those and been happy this week. The strawberries piled on top of the shortcake and topped with a dollop of whipped cream were out of this world. I don’t think I’ve ever made strawberry shortcake at home so this was a real treat! I’m so glad we made the recipe right before strawberry season rolled around. Now, when strawberries start popping up all over the place I’ll know exactly what I want to do with them!
Many, many thanks to Wendy for this week’s recipe, which will be posted on her blog. You can also see how the other bakers fared this week by visiting the Sweet Melissa Sundays site.
And now, back to my second baking adventure of the morning. Behold – this is what happens when you overfill your mini bundt pan:
And after it had cooled and settled a bit:
I didn’t get a photo of the inside of my oven, but I think you can imagine what it might look like. I pulled these out of the oven before they could make too much of a mess but it still wasn’t pretty. I yearned for this mini bundt pan for months and finally found it at a Williams Sonoma outlet. I just so happened to have a gift card so I snatched up the pan and brought it home. It’s taken me weeks to figure out what to make but I finally settled on white cake (mainly because I had so many egg whites left over after making too many custards for TWD in the past few weeks). I was so looking forward to posting about some cute mini bundt cakes today but it just wasn’t meant to be.
Fortunately, it wasn’t a total loss. I had some leftover batter after I filled the mini bundt pans so I decided to use the remainder to make cupcakes. Thankfully, they baked up without issue. I was too lazy to make frosting to go with them, so I used my leftover macerated strawberries and whipped cream to create more strawberry shortcake. The white cupcakes (I tried a Cooks Illustrated recipe which can be found here) were very moist and quite sweet and I’ll definitely make them again. When it comes to strawberry shortcake, though, I think I’ll stick with shortcakes and not cupcakes 
Lemon Bars
Glazed Grapefruit Cake
Orange Sherbet
Meyer Lemon Pound Cake
I hate when something like that happens. But everything else looks great!!
Wow, you spent quite the day in the kitchen! Everything is beautiful. Love the shortcakes and I’m very glad to know about the macerated berries. I’m sitting out SMS this week, so am having to learn from everyone else!
And bummer about the minibundts, but you’ll have that pan humming before long, I’ll bet.
Nancy
Your shortcake looks out of this world! YUM!
Bummer about the mini pan, though!
Your shortcake photos are so lovely! Isn’t strawberry shortcake just the best?!
Mais pourquoi être si cruel avec nous ! Ce que ça a l’air bon mais bon ! J’adore ça ! C’est délicieux et toutes ces fraises, miam !
Kisses from France,
Tatieva
Your shortcakes look amazing to me. I bet they tasted delicious. One of my favorite desserts ever!
That strawberry shortcake looks perfect! I think they are terrific when the dough is crumbly! I think we’ve all had baking sessions where things didn’t go exactly as planned, including cleaning out the bottom of the oven, but you really made the best of it with those cute little cupcakes! I had no idea there was such a thing as a Williams-Sonoma outlet!
I never knew that batter could do that! Now I’ll be extra careful not to overfill. Sometimes there there’s just that extra bit, I feel like I want to just top them off. Did you try the CI recipe? For some reason I can never make that! My fear of overmixing always ends up in batter that’s not mixed enough. The shortcakes and cupcakes look really good though!
I wish there was a WS warehouse near me! The things I would buy..haha
Yummy looking shortcake..I loved it! Sorry about the mishap you had.
I thought this recipe was the best ever!
Oh, Tracey, I feel your pain. =) Lately, it seems like everytime I try to make cupcakes or muffins, I have the same problem as you did with your new pan. For me, I think it’s a combination of overfilling and a thin batter that spreads really easily. I’ve had better luck with really thick batters (e.g. sour cream as the dairy instead of milk or buttermilk). The shortcake looks so good! I have strawberries right now, but no way to make the biscuits because my oven is broken. (repairman coming tomorrow!)
Awww – what a bummer. I hate it when that happens. But don’t feel bad – I tried making bagels again the other day and after 2 days of work, they ended up in the trash. I forgot to add the sugar to the recipe, and they didn’t turn out right at all.
With my sob story behind us, I agree that these cakes were really easy and really good!
I sometimes have a hard time making things in the mini pans, too! Live and learn.
Your shortcake looks de-lish!
The shortcake is beautiful and it looks as delicious as I’m sure that it was!
I can’t tell you the number of times that I’ve tried to make “mini” and gotten a little overzealous filling it up only to have a catastrophic explosion. It seems like one of the best things about blogging is that it helps us to laugh at things like this. I am in love with that mini bundt pan too and I’m sure that many wonderful cakes will come out of it in the future.
Your shortcakes look lovely! I’m glad you liked them so much.
The bundt pan part stinks, though. I’m sure you’ll figure out all their “quirks” soon enough. In the meantime, I really hope you have a self-cleaning oven!
Oh, how many times I have overfilled the pans! That is probably my most often issue in the kitchen.
Well, at least your shortcakes look spectacular!
Your shortcakes look awesome, nice job. Man I hate when things don’t work out, sorry about the mini bundt issue. I love my pans – although tend to stick with dense cakes that don’t rise much. I love how you rebounded with the cupcake.
yummy these look so good.
Your shortcake looks great!
your shortcake looked great!
too bad abt the mini bundt cakes tho
that happened to me once with these “foil cupcake liners” that didn’t need the muffin tins. you can just imagine the mess i had to clean up, but good thing all was contained on the cookie sheet!
Strawberry shortcakes are the very best way to celebrate the arrival of strawberries in the spring. Yours looks delicious!
Oh, no! re: your mini-bundt pan disaster. At least you got a cupcake out of it.
Your shortcake looks great. I’m glad it was a success. Thank you for your wonderful comments about my blog. I appreciate it.
Your shortcake looks wonderful. I did everything you shouldn’t with the dough: added extra cream and overworked it, so I was expecting the worst, but it was fine! I’m sure there will be a fantastic mini bundt recipe here soon!
OOF – Sorry about the mishap with the bundt pan! Sounds stressful. I always freak out when things start dripping all over my oven.. and then you smell that burny smell… and then the smoke… OY! Oh, I feel for ya! Looks great, though!
Awesome looking shortcakes! Sorry about the mini bundts.
Oh boy…I bet the oven was a mess, huh? Sorry about that! The shortcake looks tasty, but the strawberries…YUM!
I think they look wonderfully tasty…this was my brothers favorite dessert, so he always over ruled my chocolate fancies as my mother loved his too!
Do it again, another reason to eat it again!
don’t be afraid to add a little extra liquid next time – your flour has varying amounts of moisture in it so there is no set amount of liquid to add when working with dough. looks great though, even though it was crumbly!
Crumbly or not, those shortcakes look amazing!! I’m with you: the mascerated strawberries are the best. Yum yum!! I’m so sorry that your mini-bundts overflowed. Man, if I had a nickel for every time that happened to me…well, I’d at least have a dollar
Either way, you took your overflowing bundt pan and made it into cupcakes…that’s lemons into lemonade, in my book 
I hate when that happens, I hope it wasn’t too bad to clean up! Your shortcakes look delicious, I can’t wait till the strawberries in my yard are ready for picking.
I really loved the shortcakes, too.
And I wish I would have thought to make a smaller batch as I definitely ate too many shortcake related calories this weekend!
I’m also dying to buy one of those mini bundt cake pans but haven’t been willing to spend the dough. (dough, hahaha) I wonder how you can find out how full to fill them?
Can I have some of your strawberry shortcakes? Please? =)
Crumbly…it still looks great! The pictures are awesome.
Been there and done that, you only do it once, trust me. Your shortcake looks so good, nice job.
The shortcakes look great. Nice and tall!! Sorry about your Bundt cake mishap. I recently borrowed “The Sweeter Side of Amy’s Bread” from the library and I specifically remember at least a couple recipes that call for a mini Bundt cake pan. Give that a shot.