Who Sleeps All Night in A Cake Made of Strawberries?

If you know the answer to that question, there's a pretty good chance you were a child of the 80s. If you weren't - here's a little treat for you:

Strawberry Shortcake Cartoon *The World of Strawberry Shortcake*

I was definitely a fan of Strawberry Shortcake - I watched the shows, had the records, dressed up as her for Halloween, and even had those read along books (do they make those anymore?). It helped that I was also a fan of strawberries Up until a couple of years ago, I got a strawberry pie every year for my birthday. And there were always fresh strawberries for angel food cake all summer.

It's strawberry season hardcore in Southern California, and I'm lucky enough to be minutes from some of the sweetest strawberries in the country - fresh off the vine. This means there are always fresh strawberries in our house for lunches, snacks, and fruit salad. Even still, in all my years of strawberry-ing, I had never had strawberry rhubarb anything. A fact I intended to remedy right away! I decided I was going to make a strawberry rhubarb pie - which apparently is one of Thatboy's favorites I'm still very new to the rhubarb thing, having only made it once before, so I turned to someone who knows better.

Katie has both a strawberry rhubarb pie and a strawberry rhubarb tart in her blog. I decided to combine the two. First because all the strawberry pies I grew up with, were open-faced like her tart. Second, because even though Katie claims that her pie is made with one pie dough, I've never had good luck making a top and bottom with one pie dough, and one pie dough was what I had in my freezer. (Hey I never claimed I wasn't lazy) So I rolled out my dough, blind baked it, and while it was baking, made up the filling from the tart recipe. After cooling it appropriately I filled the crust and then played strawberry fairy. Thatboy thought the filling was too tart, something that could definitely be remedied by the addition of a little more sugar in the filling. UDubb thought it was perfectly tart - she claims the best part about a strawberry rhubarb pie is that it's not too sweet.

Not sure of how many rhubarbs it would take to make the 2 cups required for the pie, I bought 3 ginormous stalks and found I had 1 1/2 stalks left over. Which means I had to figure out another way to use them up, and of course the ample strawberries I still had gave me a clue I should find another strawberry rhubarb recipe. Enter Kristen. Like me, she had also very recently ventured into the realm of rhubarb and found success with a Land O'Lakes recipe. I figured if Kristen could find such easy success with these strawberry rhubarb crumb bars, I should be able to do the same thing, right? Right. Super right. These were a big hit. Thatboy loved them. Thatmom can't get enough. We're headed over to dinner at a family friend's house tonight and you'll never guess what I'm about to whip up to bring with us....In the words of Strawberry Shortcake, I would say I was berry berry successful!