Whenever I feel like trying a new dessert with ingredients that are in season, I tend to visit La Tartine Gourmande’s blog or epicurious.com for inspiration. It’s also a little easier to type in “strawberries” and “mascarpone” in their search boxes than to scour our cookbooks one by one.

Strawberries were on sale downstairs as I gathered ingredients for Kurt’s smokie and caesar salad dinner. Once again, impulse shopping hit! I remembered that La Tartine Gourmande had a great recipe involving mascarpone, so I grabbed a tub of that, too. Unfortunately, it also required coconut and yogurt, and someone was a little too lazy to go back to Nestor’s tonight.

Epicurious.com saved the day with this great recipe where you marinate the strawberries in a balsamic vinegar reduction and serve it with a whip of heavy cream and mascarpone. I was a little wary of the balsamic vinegar part of it but figured it was worth a shot.

After 10 minutes of prep, 30 minutes (during dinner) of chilling, and 5 minutes of presentation planning, this is how it came out:

The tang of the balsamic strawberries paired very nicely with the sweetness and richness of the mascarpone and whipped cream. This is definitely a dessert I’d serve for company…maybe for Jonny and Jane when they’re in town next weekend. We’ll see!

If you like, view the full Flickr photoset. We cooked up a storm this past week, so check out the other food-related photosets listed down the side of my Flickr homepage.