No 4th of July BBQ is complete without a tasty dessert, and the combination of lemon French yogurt cake, vanilla bean pastry cream, and fresh berries is hard to beat.

The handy thing about garnishing cute little individual tarts with fresh berries is that they are amazingly beautiful and look like you slaved in the kitchen for hours to complete - which is rarely ever the case. That being said, I'm ever the fan of delicious eats that look impressive and are in actuality so easy a trained chimp could make them.

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There are few Monday afternoon activities that top walking down the street to my town's farmers market and picking up a basket of freshly picked, California-grown strawberries. I'm not sure what it is about the Central Coast area, but the powers of earth and awesomeness have collided and provided some prime strawberry-growin' turf.

I grew up in a small town in Northwest Washington State on a defunct raspberry farm. The area however, was not only well known for its raspberries, but also the strawberries, blueberries, and hazelnuts the fertile soil allowed to flourish. I remember many a day of going strawberry picking with my mother and sister to make jams, jellies, and whatnot. (Later in life we simply bought them in 5-gallon buckets from a local farm, but I still enjoy the memories of picking them by hand - though I'm sure I drove my mother batty while doing so.)

The strawberries from my childhood memories cannot even begin to compete with the berries they grow here.

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