Elevate Your Strawberry Shortcake By Grilling It

Grilled strawberry shortcake is the sweet and umami summer treat you didn't know you needed this barbecue season. If you have an outdoor grill, then this is the perfect dessert to make on it. However, it also works on a stovetop grill. Get things started by cleaning any debris and dirt off the grill. It'll mar the flavor of the cake and the berries. Once that's out of the way, fire up the grill, heating it up to medium to medium-high heat.

Remove the hulls from the strawberries and stick four to six of them on metal skewers. You may need to make four to six skewers of strawberries, depending on how many people in your crowd plan on eating dessert. Strawberries are quite fragile berries. The skewers keep the berries intact on the grill, provided you don't cook them for more than a couple of minutes. Just sear them long enough to allow grill marks to appear on the fruit. They'll probably start to sweat a bit, too, as the heat pushes the water out of the berries, which adds moisture to the recipe.

As for the cake portion of this dessert, save yourself some time and energy by buying some angel food or pound cake at the store. Slice it up, and allow the pieces to sit on the grill until grill marks form. Plate up the dessert, topping it with whipped cream and a strawberry vinaigrette for more umami flavor and additional moisture.

You're not limited to just grilled ripe strawberries on this. Other fruits, like peaches, mangoes, plums, or pineapple, which have plenty of nectar-y juices, work great, too. You can even try grilling fruit combos like grilled peaches and strawberries together. Break up the cake and mix the fruit and cake together in a parfait glass before crowning the dessert with whipped cream and strawberries to create a fancier presentation.

Additionally, making a bath of melted butter, sugar, and cinnamon and brushing it on the fruit before you grill it offers you another way to bring some extra dessert-friendly flavors to the mix. By the same token, rather than taking the strawberries directly from skewers to plates, pull a few berries aside. Crush those berries up with a fork, adding in some cinnamon and sugar, and then mix the full-sized berries in with their crushed counterparts to bring more syrupy moisture to the dessert.

Finally, while pound and angel food cakes are popular options to use with this recipe, it's not uncommon to see strawberry shortcake made with biscuits. Grilled homemade biscuits may just be the comfort food vibe that your version of grilled strawberry short cake needs to really make your tastebuds explode.

The reason why this taste so good boils down to science (and a good harvest). Much of the sweetness of strawberries come from their fragrant scent, and when you grill strawberries and the shortcake the berries sit on, the heat from the grilling process heightens the aromas and the sweet flavors of both, courtesy of the Maillard reaction. This delectable response occurs when the heat from the flame do the tango – in a manner of speaking – with the sugars and amino acids in the fruit and cake, giving you a sweet-and-savory byproduct that's unbeatable. It's no accident that the berries taste sweeter than normal.

Of course, all of this doesn't even factor in the effects that a charcoal barbecue might have on the flavor — if you're fortunate enough to have one — nor the sweet and umami balsamic vinaigrette that ties these flavors together. While the science of it all may make the process sound a bit complicated, the recipe isn't. You can construct this dessert from ingredients you find at the local farmer's market or grocery store, taking away any argument you might have for not firing up the grill and getting starting.