Feeling Patriotic

 Red, White and Blue

Here's my my farm to fork dessert 

for the 4th of July,

star-shaped shortcakes with farm fresh berries!

All the credit for this patriotic dessert goes to Martha Stewart. I saw her idea of using star-shaped cookie cutters for shortcake biscuits many years ago.  This 4th of July, I finally made the dessert and ended up using a shortcake recipe from Fine Cooking but used Martha's idea for the star shapes.

Here are a few of my tips on making this dessert:

Farmers Market Berries

Use farm fresh berries.  

There's nothing better than farm fresh berries.  So first thing this morning, I hit the farmers' market for berries.  Once home, I cleaned the berries and sweetened them up with a little sugar and orange juice.  The orange juice idea is also from Martha Stewart.  Next it was time to make the stars.

 Stars

The star-shaped shortcakes are made with  a 3" star cookie cutter.  

To make the dough, I used my food processor which makes cutting-in the cold butter a breeze!  I  kneaded the dough gently by hand, rolled it out to about 3/4" thick and then cut out the stars.  Then I followed Martha's baking instructions and baked the shortcakes in a 400 F oven for 14 minutes.  

Shortcake, anyone?

This dessert was easy to make and received rave reviews!  I think it's a perfect all American dessert to make for the 4th of July holiday.  Just as Martha inspired me, I hope, that perhaps, I have inspired you to make it sometime. 

You can find the Fine Cooking recipe here:

Classic Strawberry Shortcake

and Martha's recipe here:

Star-Shaped Shortcakes

Happy 4th of July!