Whipped Cream with Vanilla Castor Sugar: Perfect with Strawberries for Dessert

Fresh strawberries lightly dusted with vanilla castor sugar

It is important to keep desserts fresh, simple and elegant; no more so than when you are serving ladies only for your Book Club night. For such an event, may I strongly recommend fresh strawberries, lightly dusted with Vanilla Castor Sugar, served with freshly whipped cream? 

Do, however, first make sure that your strawberries are fresh, and well-washed:  

I served strawberries with whipped cream as a dessert the other evening for my Book Club, and they particularly commented on how delicious the whipped cream was. I therefore decided it was time to share a few secrets to making it.

First of all, as with everything to do with food, whipped cream is best if you make it yourself. Sure, you can go and purchase the variety that sprays out of a can, but frankly, apart from giving the kids some fun, there is no contest with the real thing in terms of taste. 

Talking of taste, the most important thing to do is lightly sweeten and flavour the whipped cream with castor sugar, preferably your own, home-made, Vanilla Castor Sugar. The jar of pods has been extracting heady vanilla flavour for months now and it is superb to use for this purpose. If you sweeten without adding flavour, it simply is not as wonderful. 

If you don't have Vanilla Castor Sugar, then do use ordinary castor sugar. I would not advocate granular or ordinary sugar, given that you are needing to keep the sugar in suspension, but it would work in a pinch, but you'd lose some of the texture, in terms of the fantastically frothy foam. 

It is also essential that you buy whipping cream for this exercise, not double-thick cream or breakfast cream. Do make sure it is fresh too. 

Whipped Cream with Vanilla Castor Sugar Recipe 

250 ml fresh cream 

Vanilla castor sugar to taste (2-3 tablespoons recommended) 

Lightly whip the cream, either by hand, if your wrists can take the punishment, or using the egg-whisk attachment of your Kenwood or other mixer. 

You can add vanilla castor sugar to cream when the mixer leaves marks

It is important not to whip the cream too much. If you do, it will turn into butter. Stop whipping when it begins to come together such that your beater leaves lines in the cream, as depicted above. 

It is at this stage you add the vanilla castor sugar. It is very important that you wait until the cream is already beaten up before you add the sugar, otherwise all you will have is sweetened liquid, not wonderful, frothy, foam-filled concupiscent curds.

Vanilla castor sugar is superb added to whipped cream

The vanilla sugar I prefer is that made with an entire array of vanilla pods. You know the full essence is being extracted when you open the jar and the sugar has turned dark brown in the area immediately adjacent to the pods. 

Sprinkle the vanilla castor sugar into the whipped cream. I would advocate maybe 2-3 tablespoons maximum. You are just wanting to take the edge off the strongish flavour of plain cream, through the addition of this flavourant. 

Plonk into a bowl and serve:

Fresh whipped cream with vanilla castor sugar

Please note that you only whip up the cream when you are ready to serve the dessert, it starts to separate if made too long in advance, and that is not nice. 

Whipped cream is also a superb accompaniment to the Decadently Rich Chocolate Cake of which men are particularly fond:

Whipped cream served with hot chocolate cake 

Serve to your Book Club, and smile:

The Happy Bookers 

What a fresh, yummy dessert to finish off a wonderful evening of laughter and sharing.