I baked yesterday! And I noticed something interesting: in the past half year of work, I’ve baked 3 times, made non-baking sweet treats twice, and cooked a couple more times. This means my cooking is roughly the same as when I was in uni, doing stress baking (in fact, I was talking to a friend that I used to feed my sweet snacks to and he went “do you know that I don’t actually like sweet stuff?” Oops. Goes to show that I have nice friends!)

So anyway, my theory is that stress-baking isn’t actually bad-stress baking. Because I remember that during my very brief second job, I was so stressed and so tired that when I didn’t have to work, I didn’t actually have the energy to do anything else. Which means that if I’m stressed enough that I want to do something to relieve it, and actually follow through on those plans, it’s not bad stress.

(Plus, I didn’t bake when I was job-hunting and very stress-free so clearly the no-stress thing means a less productive Eustacia too).

Anyway, back to the shortcakes.

I wanted to make the strawberry cream tea cake from BBC Good Food but was vetoed because whatever I bake has to keep for a few hours as people come and grab a piece and everyone was afraid that if I made one big cake, things would get soggy. So instead, I decided to try the strawberry and vanilla shortcake, and since I was still thinking of the raspberry and chocolate scones from the National Trust Book of Scones, I decided to add raspberries too.

On to the actual baking

So things started off pretty okay – I managed to avoid using a processer and blended everything by hand (looks like practice making scones came in handy):

But things got weird when I added the milk, vanilla, and egg. It was an opportunity for Jo Jie Jie to remind me not to follow the recipe so strictly because in her view, recipes are inaccurate by nature (because if the recipes work, then no one will buy the actual food). She was validated because the dough turned into a sticky mess.

I’m not sure why “clumpy dough” means but since we need to be able to roll the dough and cut it into circles, we figured that dough that stuck to our hands wasn’t it. So we kept adding flour until we got something that looked okay. And in the oven they went!

I was pretty worried because I was only making this one batch and if I messed it up, that was it, but they turned out okay! The dough rose and I got these little cuties:

After that, all I had to do was assemble everything and take lots of pictures:

Okay, I managed to restrain myself and take only a few pictures. Oddly enough, the shortbread tasted like scones. I’m not complaining, because it went very well with the berries and clotted cream, but I wonder if I did something wrong. Or if I didn’t, what is the difference between scones and shortbread? I always through shortbread was a type of buttery biscuit but this was definitely not a biscuit. It was light and fluffy and really more like a scone or a bun.

But no matter what it is, it went very well with the Stratford All Day Blend from Benson’s House of Tea. The perfect afternoon tea!