Olallieberries and Shortcake

Olallieberry is just such a fun word to say. Their rarity and relatively short season also mean there are few chances to utter the word. So when it gets to around this time of year, Mike and I take great delight in saying to each other, “Do you think the olallieberries are in season yet?”

Last weekend we decided to take a trip down to our favorite berry u-pick farm and find out. Unlike other years where it was brilliantly sunny, this year found us driving down through a chilly fog. The weather didn’t matter though, as long as there were rows and rows of berry-laden bushes waiting for us!

The bright, raspberry-red berries aren’t ready for picking yet; you want the purply wine-dark ones. Last year we went a little too early and the ripe ones were far and few in between, and not as sweet as we’d hoped. This year our timing was better and we filled our little wagon easily with ripe berries.

Mike, expert berry picker. The ripest berries are usually found low to the ground, under leafy shade. You might walk by a bush that looks covered in red unripe specimens, then bend down and find a whole trove of berries hiding under the leaves, waiting to be picked.

If you saw my other olallieberry post, I’ve made quite a few things with these guys (the ones that didn’t get eaten up, that is). They can pretty much be used in any berry recipe you have as well. This time, I had the idea for shortcake (probably because Mike has been having biscuit cravings lately…and shortcake is a form of biscuit!) So, brown sugar shortcakes with lemon verbena cream and olallieberries?

I thought it would be funny to stick a lemon verbena leaf on top of the shortcake because sticking random greenery on dessert is so wrong and outdated right? But it’s actually ok here since there is lemon verbena in the dessert. I pretty much want to infuse everything with lemon verbena right now because our lemon verbena plant is growing like crazy, and I can’t get enough of the scent. It adds a lovely freshness to the whole dessert, and it provide a nice base for the olallieberries.

I cooked the berries with a little sugar, just long enough for them to soften and sweeten a bit, which I think helps them mesh with rest of the dessert better than if they were just raw, but also lets you fully enjoy their berry-ness without them being buried under all the other flavors.  As for the shortcake biscuits, they were light and fluffy and hopefully what Mike was hankering for – I think so because he did clean his plate!