A Life (Time) of Cooking

A Recipe from the past.

I first baked this dish with with Amber in December 1998, on sunny Saturday afternoon, while eating her home made guacamole. NO effort, amazing results. It became a dish that I took to many places, cooking it in various kitchens of various friends and family, a dessert easily whipped up yet looks so wonderfully complex and amazing.

No one eats baked strawberries, right? Yet, they are so delicious. Try it immediately. I recommend 1 punnet of strawberries for every four to six people, depending on whether you want a lot of strawberries, or are happy to use it in a sauce like manner, drizzling it over whatever is on hand.

This recipe is perfect for the end of season strawberries that perhaps are not as perfect as the mid summer ones.

Serving Notes

• Serve with whipped (unsweetened) cream, Marscapone cheese, creme fraîche, or vanilla icecream.
• Serve for breakfast surrounded by muesli.
• Serve on pancakes, or over crumpets or icecream.
• Be daring and serve with a wonderful (but eggless) Chocolate Pudding or dessert.
• Drizzle it into the middle of halved and stoned summer stone fruit.
• Maybe even blend any leftovers into a yummy sauce.

It is quite a sweet dish, so a little goes a long way. Think strawberry shaped strawberry jam mouthfuls. It is also quite hot when it comes out of the oven (due to the sugar), so watch your mouth. It can be served hot, warm, cool or cold.

Recipe Notes

The basic recipe is just strawberries and sugar. And that works VERY well.

If you want to play, there are a whole range of things you can add. However, a word of caution. Only add 1 or 2 additional ingredients otherwise the complexities of flavour become overwhelming. Baked strawberries have an intense flavour - sort of a jam flavour. I suggest that you cook it without any additional ingredients before beginning to adjust flavours.

Tonight I used a punnet of strawberries, some dried cranberries, white sugar, a small piece of vanilla bean and a pinch of black pepper. And served it with some Maggie Beer icecream. Heaven in a bowl.

Baked Strawberries

Source : From my old Food_Matters site
Cuisine: Hmm. French?
Prep time: 5 mins
Cooking time: 25 - 30 mins
Serves: 4 - 6 people, depending how you use it

ingredients
750g strawberries
0.25 - 0.5 cup vanilla sugar, other flavoured sugar, or plain white sugar (add less or more as your taste dictates)

optional ingredients
Choose zero or more of the following
1 - 2 Tblspn strawberry or similar liqueur
a slice or two of fresh ginger, chopped finely
1 piece crystallised ginger, chopped finely
0.5 vanilla bean (if not using flavoured sugar), halved with the seeds scraped into the baking dish
a grind or two of fresh black pepper
dried cranberries
cinnamon stick
sprig of rosemary
lavender flowers
honey instead of sugar
let your imagination run wild (once you are used to cooking this dish), but don’t underestimate the intensity of strawberry flavours. So make sure any ingredient that you use is compatible with strawberries.

method
Heat the oven to 180C.

Place strawberries in a single layer in a very shallow baking dish (not a metal dish). You can hull them (remove the green top) or leave the green top on.

Sprinkle with the sugar. There will appear to be a lot of sugar for the amount of strawberries. Don’t worry - this is pure indulgence!

For variety, add one or two of the optional ingredients.

Bake for 30 minutes. The strawberries will lose a lot of their juice, creating a strawberry syrup as the juice combines with the sugar.

Serve hot, warm or cold with icecream, cream or mascapone.

Yum. Eat. Enjoy!

People are Saying:

The wonderful bee from julalbandi made this dish, and wrote a post with fabulous photos describing her variations. Make sure that you read it.

When we saw this recipe @ A Life (Time) of Cooking over the weekend, we had to try it right away.

On DiscussCooking.com Amy, Executive Chef asks:

What I have in mind are these *Baked Strawberries w ice cream or individual strawberry shortcakes w mascarpone. Wondering if I can use the lavender in a compound butter w strawberries/honey/lavender (for pancakes, french toast, crostini, etc.). What do you think? TIA

*Baked Strawberries

Read Some More

Make sure that you check out julalbandi’s post with fabulous photos describing bee’s variations to this recipe.

Daily Musings makes a lovely Strawberry Syrup, to eat with fritters.

Aayi’s Recipes has Strawberry Paank. Yum!

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