At the first sight of ripe, red strawberries at the grocery store each spring, I go absolutely bonkers.  Bonkers, people. Three pints for $5? Great, I’ll take six … that kind of bonkers.  After a long, cold winter of nothing but apples, pears and imported oranges, strawberries are a sign of all things summery to come.  Visions of warm days filled with cookouts, burgers and fruit salad dance through my mind.  Of course, this all leads to thought of lounging poolside in a bathing suit, which immediately puts a damper on my desire to swirl those beautiful strawberries into a batter of sugar, flour, butter and all kinds of badness.

What is better than a bowl brimming with fresh, ripe strawberries topped with a lush, creamy vanilla yogurt?  Not much.  The beautiful thing about this dessert is the utter simplicity of it.  When it’s too darn hot for thinking of turning on the oven, this cool bowl of deliciousness is a perfect way to satisfy your sweet tooth without sabotaging your bathing suit body!  Rather than topping these beautiful berries with gobs of whipped cream, the topping is a mixture of Greek yogurt, agave nectar (or honey) and vanilla.  Super simple, low-calorie deliciousness to keep you in bathing suit shape!

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I’ve had this scone recipe from the incomparable Heidi, waiting in the wings for a few weeks. I’ve become slightly obsessed with agave nectar and, since Heidi already used a natural sweetener (maple syrup), I thought this would be a perfect recipe to experiment with.  I should probably warn you … when you come home from the store with a mountain of strawberries that look as beautiful as these do and you happen to have just enough milk in the fridge for one batch of scones … you might end up having what I’ve termed a Sudden Strawberry Scone Emergency.

Fear not, this emergency can be easily and quickly handled.  However, there is only one way to put out the fire: Make strawberry scones immediately.  Luckily, these only take about 35 minutes to prep and bake (plus a few minutes for cooling … if you can wait!).  Upon devouring these perfect little scones, your Sudden Strawberry Scone Emergency will be under control in no time.  At least mine was!

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When it comes to strawberry cake, there are a shocking lack of recipes that are truly made from scratch. Most recipes call for white cake mix, strawberry gelatin packages or mounds of strawberry preserves. Delicious as they may be, I was not willing to give in to the Sandra Lee mentality (though I know there are times when it is an absolute necessity), and I decided to experiment with some truly, from-scratch recipes to see if I could make a strawberry cake that was homemade (and delicious) without resorting to any strange gelatin packages or overly processed preserves.

I saw a suggestion on some web discussion board (probably Chowhound) to use another dense fruit cake recipe and substitute strawberries for the original fruit. With that in mind, I dove head first into a classic Paula Deen recipe for Hummingbird Cake, which is traditionally made with mashed bananas and pineapple. I switched the bananas and the pineapple for pureed strawberries, left out the chopped nuts completely, and substituted lemon zest for the cinnamon. I’m convinced that it would have been an outstanding success on the first try if I hadn’t first suffered through the Great Flour Debacle.

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