Yankee Shortcake:
Go preheat an oven to 400 degrees and make sure the rack is on the middle. Get a nice baking sheet and grease it with straight butter.
2 cups all purpose flour (place in large bowl)
Three and a half teaspoons of baking powder (Rumford is best, non aluminum, adjust amount up or down 1/2 teaspoon to account for sensitivity to baking powder taste)
Pinch salt
Two tablespoons sugar
^ Mix those things in with it.
Cut in four tablespoons of soft butter with a pastry knife or a fork or your fingers, and then two tablespoons of your favorite oil. These two tablespoons of butter substituted with, say, ultralight olive oil, are the difference between a delicious baked food and a night spent tossing and turning with heartburn. Your mileage may vary.
Get a 3/4 cup of milk. Optional: Buttermilk for taste.
Now you have a nice white looking grainy mixture. Stir in that milk. Stir SLOWLY. The object is to just carefully mix the milk into the dry ingredients, creating a soggy white dough, not to whip it into submission which will destroy the texture. Be generous with the milk and use all 3/4 cup. These are drop shortcakes, not rolled.
Get a nice wooden spoon. If you don't have one, any other will do. Drop four inch wide shortcakes on the baking sheet. They should be around 4" by 3" or so and an inch thick, this is so that they will fit best in the bowl. You may of course vary this.
Put them in the oven. Set your watch for ten minutes and get the pound of frozen strawberries out of the fridge. Frozen strawberries never go bad, but you can mix some of your fresh ones into the saucepan after cutting off the rotted parts. Tip: If you buy nice strawberries, freeze them yourself. Then you won't be throwing out perfectly good fruit that you didn't eat soon enough.
Squirt some lemon juice (maybe 1/4 tsp) and dap some white sugar (maybe two tablespoons) into the pan with them. Hey, I never said this was a healthy treat.
Put it on medium until they're all melted, then crank it up to high. Add a LITTLE water if the strawberries are all lonesome and juiceless, if you put in 1/8 cup they'll be swimming by the time you want to use them, so use your judgement.
Take the pint of really good vanilla icecream out of the fridge. Go check the shortcake. Yes, it's okay to break a little piece off to see if they're done inside. You can always put it back and then eat it immediately when you take them out.
The strawberry sauce should be boiling hard now. Let it keep boiling until the shortcake is done. You'll know they're done when their bottoms are getting brown, the peaks on top are browning, and the interior doesn't feel undone.
Take the shortcake out, stick a big spoon in the saucepan, split the shortcakes in half so now you have a lot of 1/2" thick shortbread slices, and get the bowls out. Put a layer of shortcake in the bottom so that they cover the bottom and stick up the sides, then put your chosen amount of icecream in the bowl, with a depression in the middle. Ladle boiling strawberries and their sauce generously over the icecream.
Now you have:
warm shortcake
cool vanilla icecream
hot strawberries.
If you're trying to seduce a woman, this is the first dessert to make in front of her. (practice first)
