Strawberry Rhubarb Crisp

I have a smaller rhubarb plant that will produce enough for one great rhubarb dish per year. I wanted to try a new recipe and really enjoyed this one. The original recipe calls for rhubarb only, but I made this a strawberry rhubarb variation. Don't forget to serve this with vanilla ice cream or custard.

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Honey Lime Fruit Salad

If you're looking for a new way to make fruit salad, give this a try. The honey and lime juice add a great flavor while the fruits themselves offer something much more exciting that what is sometimes served as a fruit salad.

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Strawberry Salad with Poppy Seed Dressing

I tend to make the same salad 95% of the time. The veggies might change, but I don't stray from my "house" dressing too often. It's my family's favorite that my mom and grandma make. However, it's sometime fun to mix it up and serve a different salad. I have always loved poppy seed dressing, but had never made it in the past. I was looking for a new, colorful salad to make for guests and decided to try this recipe. It was a hit and I enjoyed the crunch from the nuts combined with the other elements.

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Fruit Tart

I've attempted several fruit tarts in the past and never really found a great recipe. Generally speaking, the crusts have all been fine, but I've never found a cream filling that I loved. I've tried (and failed) making pastry cream from scratch. I've made cream cheese fillings, but the flavor was never quite right. With this tart, I combined 2 fruit tart recipes and ended up with an amazing result.

The cream filling for this tart is the cheaters way of making a delicious and really easy fruit tart. It tastes amazing and the texture is great, but it only takes minutes to whip it up. I made this version of a fruit tart as a birthday cake and it was a huge success. Not only do fruit tarts look stunning, but people tend to love them. If you need to make this recipe ahead of time, prepare all the elements individually and only cut fruits and assemble when you need it.

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Strawberry Oatmeal Bars

When it comes to baking in Switzerland, my kitchen supplies are pretty limited (which is partly why I love baking when I visit my family). I have an abundance of cookie sheets, one cake form, and 2 different sized baking dishes. I have to say that I miss making muffins and cupcakes, but on the plus side, I've actually started making more cookies and bars. I actually really love bars, whether they're lemon bars, hello dollies, or pecan bars. After craving sweets (again) and being unable to find the ingredients I really wanted (again), I opted to make these simple bars. The recipe is extremely forgiving and easy to adjust to your liking. I loved the gooey bites full of strawberry jam and was very happy with this end result. They also tasted great 2 days later (I wouldn't know anything beyond that since that's when the last square was eaten).

Make this recipe with whatever jam you like or have at home. I had a huge jar of strawberry jam at home, so that's what I used. Anything from apricot to raspberry jam would be excellent in this. You can also add whatever spices you like to the dough base if you want to switch it up a bit. I'm sure you could substitute some whole wheat flour for the all purpose flour as well if you want a slightly healthier variation.

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Tres Leches Cake with Berries

I must have been living under a rock or something, because I'd never had tres leches up until this summer. I'd also only heard about it a few times. This dessert is rich and moist and absolutely perfect for any summer occasion. You can make many different versions of this cake, but I loved the idea of berries covering the cake. The original recipe adds some booze to the whipped cream, but I opted against it since I'm not a gin or tequila fan. One of the recipe reviewers said they added a splash of Grand Marnier to their whipped cream, which is something  I will try in the future. When I was going to make this, I was deciding between a coffee infused version or the berries, but in the end the berries won. Although I cannot be sure, the coffee flavored cake seemed like it would have a tiramisu sort of flavor and I was up for something new.

I made this for the first time at my sister's house. There was no particular reason for me making this cake except that I really wanted to try it, and so did she. My family and I ate about a quarter of the cake and then my sister took the rest to work the following day where it was apparently devoured in minutes. She said she set it down in the break room and by lunch time it was all gone. You might be wondering why I would share such a delicious dessert. For starters, even though it is amazing, it's very rich and you'd be suffering from a serious food coma if you had seconds. And I love sharing things that I bake, assuming they turn out well.

If you are curious about some of the different tres leches cake flavors you can make, check out this link from Fine Cooking Magazine.

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Strawberry Butter

A while back I ran into the dilemma of what to do with strawberries that didn't have a lot of flavor. It turns out this problem has come up again. I love a perfectly ripe strawberry that's bursting with flavor, but the last 2 time I bought them they were pretty sad excuses for strawberries. Yes, they looked beautifully red and delicious, but the taste was not impressive. This time, I decided to take those berries and make some strawberry butter.

Strawberry butter is a great way to switch up your standard toast with butter. It's sweet and the added sugar brings out the hidden flavor in the berries. I imagine if the strawberries are flavorful to begin with this might be even better. But I was really happy with the result of this butter. It's great on English muffins, scones, and pancakes. You can adjust the sweetness to your preference really easily, but I like mine the way the recipe was written. You can also swap in different berries, like raspberries, if you have them on hand. In the recipe, the berries and butter are blended together in a food processor, but if you don't have one, you can get away with smashing all the ingredients together until you get the right consistency, which is what I did.

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Orange Glazed Strawberry Scones

I have finally been able to use a real kitchen again! It has been way too long since I baked and I was thrilled to get my hands covered in sticky dough again. Since summer fruits and berries are starting to taste better and are more readily available, I decided to make these strawberry scones. I also wanted to bake personal sized pastries as opposed to a large pie or cake since right now there are only 2 of us at home and I knew I'd be sharing whatever I made with our neighbors. I found this recipe and it sounded like the perfect way to use up some of the strawberries I had just bought.

As I mentioned in my easy scones recipe, I don't always have the best of luck with scones. I often find them boring, dry, and unexciting. This recipe was the opposite of all those things. The orange zest adds great flavor to the dough (I may have eaten quite a bit of it raw) and the strawberries make the scones moist. I really like that the butter is grated in this recipe and you don't need to fuss over cutting it into small chunks. It may seem like there's a lot of sugar in this recipe when compared to other scone recipes, but I found it to be the perfect amount. The strawberries become soft and jam-like after they're baked, so I ate these without any extra toppings, like the usual butter and jam. The glaze is a nice addition, but not totally necessary. It makes them look really pretty if you're baking for looks, but if you're impatient not to worry, the flavor is in the scone, not the glaze. I opted against making the egg wash, but I'll add it in the recipe in case some of you prefer that look. I ate these fresh out of the oven and was in homemade pastry heaven.

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Strawberry Bowle

Bowle is a sparkling wine drink that makes a beautiful beverage for any special occasion. It's sort of like a sparkling wine punch and is served out of a large punch bowl. My mom often makes bowle as a pre Thanksgiving dinner drink, which nobody is ever opposed to. Although it would be ideal to make this in the summer when strawberries are in season, it makes a great festive drink for the holidays or New Year's Eve. The wine I used in this bowle was a Chenin Blanc, but you could also use Riesling or something similar. The amount of sugar you add to the strawberries depends on your preference. If you want a sweet drink add a little more, especially since the strawberries available this time of the year are not very sweet on their own.

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Tangy Strawberry Lemonade

For a few years now, I've wanted to try making homemade lemonade. I don't have any excuse for not making this sooner, but am glad I finally did. I wanted to make strawberry lemonade since I've already had my fair share of traditional lemonade this summer. My search began on the Food Network website, but once I looked elsewhere, I quickly found this recipe and knew it was what I wanted to make.

This lemonade is really tangy, but still sweet. Many recipes for strawberry lemonade include the pureed berry in the lemonade, but I like this one because it just uses the berries for flavor. To me, a glass of lemonade should not have seeds and berry pulp in it. Because this lemonade is smooth and does not have chunks of fruit puree in it, it also make a great cocktail. Add a splash of vodka and you have a refreshing, colorful adult beverage. You could also freeze this and make a delicious popsicle.

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Strawberry Cheesecake Ice Cream

The weather has been crazy here. It rains all night and in the mornings, then it reaches the 70s in the late afternoon. This has been messing with my baking and cooking moods like crazy. I wake up wanting hot cocoa and scones, and by the evening a salad sounds perfect. Today was another one of these crazy days. I woke up to clouds, some rain, and cool weather. By 10 am I called my neighbor to cancel our walk for the day since cloudy days make me unproductive and lazy. While talking to her, she commented on how it was a baking day, and I realized that was the perfect thing to do. I found a recipe for oatmeal cookies and got to work. The recipe suggested chilling the cookies before baking them, so they're currently sitting in the fridge.

But guess what happened during this chilling period... it got sunny. I'm no longer in the mood for warm, chewy cookies. Instead, I just had a huge bowl of strawberry cheesecake ice cream that I made last week. I had forgotten all about this ice cream since it hasn't really been the weather for it, but now seems like the perfect day to share this with you.

The flavor in the ice cream is all there: fresh strawberries, cream cheese, graham cracker crust. It's a really simple ice cream to make since there's no custard in this recipe and if you don't mind the texture of strawberry seeds, you can skip the step where they get removed. When you take it out of the freezer give it a minute to soften before digging in. Apparently you can make this with fresh or frozen strawberries, but since I went a bit strawberry happy at the farmer's market last week, I used fresh ones.

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Strawberry Frozen Yogurt

My sister recently got an ice cream maker attachment for her KitchenAid and has been on a homemade ice cream kick ever since. When I first came to visit her, she had made an amazing zabaglione ice cream that was very addictive. This weekend we decided to tackle frozen yogurt (it's healthy, right?) since we had tons of strawberries in the house. Not only is making frozen yogurt pretty easy, but it actually tastes like the fruit it is made of.

Store bought strawberry frozen yogurt from often tastes like artificial flavoring, but this tasted like real (macerated) strawberries. This recipe is a perfect refreshing summer treat. It's texture is similar to sorbet and is not as soft as a frozen yogurt, unless you eat it straight away without completely freezing it. Once you give this a try, you'll realize that you've been missing out on the homemade frozen sweets phenomenon.

This recipe is from David Lebovitz's Perfect Scoop, which is filled with tons of inspiring desserts. He has recipes for everything from avocado ice cream to cantaloupe sorbet to butterscotch pecan ice cream. Looking through that book, I wanted to try everything at once. If it's in your budget to get an ice cream maker this summer, I highly recommend it. Not only will your ice cream be delicious, but you'll know exactly what's going into it.

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