Vanilla Bean Whipped Cream with Strawberries

The other day I ended up with two boxes of strawberries.  I love strawberries but I realized that I needed to do something with them fairly quickly before they went bad.  That’s when I got the idea of strawberries and cream!  I didn’t grow up eating whipped cream and probably had my first can of whipped cream not that many years ago and then learned how to make my own.

To me it’s almost a sin not to make your own whipped cream.  The stuff in the can has all sorts of gross and unnatural ingredients in it like corn syrup and lots of things that are hard to pronounce.  Making it yourself is so easy.  At the most basic you just need heavy/whipping cream and sugar.  This time around I remembered that I had some vanilla beans at the back of my cupboard and knew there was some way to integrate them into my whipped creamy goodness.

Enter Martha Stewart and her recipe for vanilla bean whipped cream!  Sure there’s an extra step of soaking the vanilla bean seeds (are they even called seeds) in the cream but it’s worth it.  The berries themselves were lackluster but the whipped cream made them more palatable.  Really, the berries were just a vehicle for eating more whipped cream.

Enjoy!

Vanilla Bean Whipped Cream

Ingredients

• 2 cups heavy cream
• 1 vanilla bean
• 1/4 cup sugar

Directions

1. Chill the bowl and whisk attachment of an electric mixer. Place cream in a medium bowl. Cut vanilla bean in half lengthwise and scrape seeds into cream. Add bean to cream; whisk to combine. Cover mixture and refrigerate for 1 hour.
2. Strain cream mixture through a fine mesh sieve into chilled bowl of an electric mixer. Transfer bowl to mixer fitted with chilled whisk attachment; beat on medium speed for 1 minute.
3. With the mixer running, sprinkle in sugar. Increase speed to medium-high and beat until soft peaks form. Serve immediately or cover and refrigerate, up to 2 hours.