Weeknight Desserts

I realize I've been slacking. I don't really have an excuse- I guess I am just extra busy? Although I don't know whats causing me to be busy? Maybe I'm just extra tired? Extra lazy? Well whatever the problem, I'm working on fixing it :-) These are recipes from a couple weeks ago (again), I promise I will get better about posting recipes before a week or more has passed! 

These are fun, simple, and relatively small desserts that are easy to make on a week night. I had all this stuff in my cupboards/refrigerator and needed to use it all before it went bad, so what did I do? I made up a couple little desserts, of course.

The first is strawberry shortcake! When you think of strawberry shortcake you don't have to think of store-bought, dry angel food cake and mushed strawberries. You can easily make it a little more elegant without more work! For this recipe, I used some refrigerated pop and eat biscuits, fresh strawberries and some whipped cream. It's the fresh strawberries mixed with the biscuit short cakes that elevates this dessert.

Start by rolling out your biscuits. You don't want to just bake the biscuits as that defeats the purpose and isn't very tasty. SO- use a rolling pin to roll out your dough until it is about 1/4" in thickness. Use a round cookie cutter to cut out small circles (depending on how big your circle cutter is, you can get about 3 circles per one biscuit). Place each round on a greased cookie sheet and poke all over the top with a fork. This is very important, this ensures that the dough will not puff up too much while in the oven, keeping the texture more shortcake-like rather than biscuit-like. Bake according to package directions and sprinkle with cinnamon sugar when they are hot out of the oven. Let your short cakes cool while you quarter fresh strawberries and mix with a sprinkle of sugar. 

Assemble however you like, I prefer mine to look pretty, so I layered two shortcakes, strawberries and cream. You can just pile yours in a bowl, or mush it up, or whatever you like to do with your strawberries and shortcake; none of my business ;-)

I bought a case of peaches at the last farmer's market this summer. A CASE! I wanted enough peaches to last me through the fall and maybe even part of the winter because the ones you buy at the store just do not compare, at all. 

Again for this recipe, I used refrigerated biscuit dough (just the other half the package I used for the strawberry shortcake). Again, begin by rolling out biscuit dough to about 1/4" thickness. Use a circle cutter to cut circles out of the dough (these will be bigger circles as they need to be big enough to fill a muffin pan). Place the circles in a greased muffin tin, and poke with a fork. Again: this will prevent the dough from puffing up too much while in the oven. Cook the empty shells about 5-7 minutes until they start to brown. We want to give the shells a little bit of a head start so that they cook all the way through when topped with the peaches and don't come out of the oven mushy and undercooked. 

While the shells are taking a quick trip in the oven, start peeling and slicing your peaches! To make 5 of these little guys I used 2 medium sized peaches and ended up with some leftover. Dice into small chunks, add 1 Tbsp of sugar, 1 Tbsp of flour, 1/4 tsp of cinnamon and a dash of nutmeg. When the shells come out of the oven, top with a spoonful of peach filling mixture and put back into the oven for about 10-15 more minutes or until the crust is golden brown and cooked through, and the peaches are warm and tender. Pull these cute little treats out of the oven and cool on a wire rack. Pop them out of the muffin tin and top with caramel sauce for a little extra yummy-ness!

These are easy, fun, yummy and perfect for a quick, weeknight dessert :-) Plus, you can pick them up and eat them with your hands! What's better than a pie you can eat with your hands?! YUM.