Everything I want to do with strawberries

A fruit bucket list

Photo by Ali Elliott on Unsplash

This time around I envisioned the strawberries in slices. They would be thin and wide, fanned out over granola that I toasted in the oven for a careful 22 minutes. The granola is cooled now, of course, and comes up off the sheet pan quite nicely. I can scoop it up with a steel serving spoon and toss it onto my Greek yogurt. When it falls, it looks like bits of autumn leaves it’s so perfectly golden.

Then the strawberry fans. I’ve probably had the brilliant idea to let them sit in a sprinkle of sugar while I fiddled with the oats, so by now they’re glossy with juices. Atop the dry granola they gleam like a wet shell dropped in dry sand.

Imagine if I were the type of woman who woke up calm to a kitchen I had cleaned the night before. Imagine life was a piece of cake, so much so that cake could be made on a whim.

A simple cake, a beloved berry.

It’s late morning and I’ve just read in bed for two hours with a mug of hojicha tea. (Imagine!) Spring time and windows open, I drift into the kitchen and begin washing the strawbs, admiring their deep color while I give them a rough chop. A fleck of red lands on my white nightgown. I don’t care. In this fantasy I am very good at laundry.

The oven is preheated, the butter is whipped, the wet and dry ingredients have been delicately combined. I fold in the strawberries and watch the dough swallow them, then scrape it all into a pan.

In college, I minored in French. Oui, c’est vrai. In French strawberry is une fraise (feminine, of course). On reddit, I read about fruit stands outside of Paris where tourists find baskets of small, bright red fraises that seem too good to be true. They eat them and think, oh mon dieu, quelle fraise! One comment described the French countryside as “the Garden of Eden” based solely on these berries.

Every day I dream of fruits from sunny lands. Fruits of all shapes and colors—yellow oval mangos with slick orange inside, a brown sapodilla that fits in the palm and looks you in the eye when it’s halved, tiny bananas that taste like pudding. And now, French strawberries.

The best way to celebrate a fruit is to eat it ripe, napkinless, outdoors in the sun. Let the juices stain, splash, drip, let the fruit sing its song.

When the sun is gone I consider alternative methods: fruit altars in the form of cakes. A Fraisier—the French cake, not the NBC sitcom. I will acquire the freshest berries and measure ingredients by weight. Only the best for god’s holy fruit. I sift the flower and whisk the eggs thoroughly so my génoise cake rises to a light and airy stature. My pastry cream comes together like a painting.

With an instructional YouTube video pulled up on my phone, my phone propped against a ceramic jar of spoons, I will begin the assembly. Because I am a reasonable woman, I have chosen to use the ring of my springform pan rather than buy a distinguished cake collar. I plop the génoise in the middle and build a wall of strawberry slices around the ring. This probably is harder than it looks on YouTube, and it’s likely my strawberries are fainting, drooping down and tumbling over. I do my best to force them into position as I pipe in the cream, but when I remove the ring it will all sink into a cake blob anyway. The flavor is there, the presentation is not. Even a fantasy shouldn’t be perfect.