{TWD} Devilish Shortcakes

In the past few months, chocolate recipes have been scarcer than hen's teeth in the baking lineup of the Tuesdays With Dorie group. We've enjoyed a wonderful selection of seasonal fruit-based recipes; there's definitely been no lack of apple and cranberry sweets. But a little chocolate is good for the soul, so I was happy to see this week's selection, Devilish Shortcakes. I've never heard of chocolate shortcakes, but I was willing to give them a try!

n.o.e.'s notes:

- We can thank Tania of the blog Love Big, Bake Often for selecting the shortcakes this week, and her post contains the recipe.

- I halved this recipe, and ended up with 6 large shortcakes. I think that next time I would make smaller ones, like biscuits.

- To boost the chocolate flavor of this recipe, I used Double-Dutch Dark Cocoa powder from King Arthur Flour.

- The recipe comes together easily (Thank you, Tania). Although Dorie prefers to use her fingertips to combine the flour and butter, I have much better luck using a pastry blender.

- I gave a little taste when these came out of the oven and discovered that they are actually not very sweet or assertive in flavor; so I made a quick compote with frozen blackberries to serve as a filling with sweetened whipped cream.


the verdict:

I love serving shortcakes to my book group, because we can all assemble our desserts to our own tastes. These shortcakes were not a rich chocolate dessert in themselves, but they did make a lovely vehicle for filling and topping. They could definitely take a warm chocolate or caramel sauce but I was glad to go the fruit and cream route.

Blackberries are my favorite fruit to combine with chocolate. The mild cakes paired nicely with the bright acidity of the blackberry sauce, and the whipped cream unified and smoothed out the flavors. The shortcakes were generally well-received, although many of us had half a cake because they were so large.


Other shortcake recipes I've baked and posted:

Ginger Peach Shortcakes
Strawberry Shortcakes