Cherry Crumble pie

We had such a nice surprise a few weeks back. We have a cherry tree in our front yard that has been here ever since we bought the house several years ago, but it never really produced much fruit. Maybe a few at the very top for the squirrels to eat. But this year was a different story. Tons of cherries and within reach! So Jeff and I spent an afternoon picking cherries in our front yard. We ended up with about five pounds of cherries! We pitted and froze about half, and the other half I made into a pie which came out incredibly good! The recipe below is for a full-size pie that I made a few weeks ago, but you can make four mini-pies instead which is what I did this week. One thing I noted below in the recipe is to bake the pie in the lower third of the oven. Rather than pre-bake your pie shell to avoid “soggy bottom” you can refrigerate the rolled out pie dough in the pie pan prior to baking, add your filling and bake on the lower rack and it will brown the bottom. That is if your oven heats from the bottom up. I had read about this somewhere and tried it and it worked really well! Recipe below, enjoy!

Cherry Crumble pie

Crumble:

• 2/3 cup rolled oats

• 1/2 cup all-purpose flour

• 1/2 cup brown sugar

• 1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon

• 1/4 teaspoon Cardamom 

• 1/2 teaspoon kosher salt

• 6 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted and cooled

Sour cherry filling:

• 3/4 cup sugar

• 3 tablespoons cornstarch

• 1/4 teaspoon kosher salt

• 2 1/4 pounds fresh sour cherries, pitted, or 2 pounds frozen sour cherries, partially thawed

• 1 Pie Dough, recipe here

Prepare your pie crust in advance so it’s well chilled. Roll out your pie dough, place in pie dish, cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least 1 hour. 

Preheat oven to 375°. 

Prepare the cherry filling by mixing sugar, cornstarch and salt together in a medium bowl, then toss in the cherries until well coated.

In another medium bowl whisk together the oats, flour, brown sugar, spices and salt. Pour the cooled melted butter over the flour mixture and stir to combine well (sometimes it’s easier to do this with your hands).

When the pie crust is good and chilled, pour in the cherry filling mixture, then top with the crumble mixture. Place the pie on a baking sheet and bake for 50-60 minutes on the bottom third of your oven (this helps the bottom crust to cook better). About 45 minutes for the mini-pies. Remove from oven and cool before serving.

Recipe adapted from Smitten Kitchen

Black Forest Cake

Black Forest Cake. or rather a Black Forest Gateau. Gateau just means cake with cream and fruit filling. I didn’t know that so thought to pass that along. I asked Jeff what kind of cake he would like for his birthday and he showed me this Black Forest Gateau on BBC good food. It looked amazing! I searched around for other recipes online and came up with the one I’m posting here. I’m really happy with the results so decided to take some photos and do a blog post. The cake part of the recipe is from Call Me Cupcake and the rest, the filling and topping, is from my previous cake recipes, with the exception of the brandied cherries which I sort of made up, there are so many different ways to make them, but they came out really good! It’s not cherry season so I used frozen cherries. I couldn’t find any Bada Bing cherries in a jar (I didn’t need 6 jars!), which would have looked nice on top of the cake, but I just worked with what I could find. It’s weird these days why it’s hard to find certain things, not just toilet paper but jalapeños at Whole Foods? None? Really? oh well. We just have to make do with what we have and appreciate what we do have. 

I’d like to think of this as a beautiful mess. It came out much messier than I expected, I wanted a few drips of ganache down the sides and it proceeded to pour over like a waterfall out of control. But hey that’s ok. Jeff sort of marveled at all the layers and things going on. Puddles of chocolate? Who can complain about that. This cake will make you smile, I promise. Most of this is make-ahead-recipes so it’s quick to assemble on the day your serving it. You really could make everything the day before, then just warm the ganache, assemble and chill before serving.

Oh, I just remembered, another thing I couldn’t get with my grocery delivery was Mascarpone for the frosting. So I ordered an extra pint of whipping cream and made it myself, you can find the recipe here, it’s very easy to make. It needs to strain for at least 12 hours so it’s best to do it at night and it will be ready the next day. I’m finding all these weird things I’ve made over the years coming in very handy lately!

The Cake

• 4 ounces butter, 1 stick

• 2 1/2 cups all purpose flour

• 3/4 cup cocoa powder

• 2 teaspoons baking powder

• 2 teaspoons baking soda

• pinch of salt

• 2 cup granulated sugar

• 2 large egg

• 1 1/3 cup sour cream

• 3/4 cup hot water

Heat oven to 350°F (175°C). Butter and flour three parchment-lined 9-inch cake pans. Cut the butter into chunks and melt in the microwave or stove top and set aside to cool.

Sift the flour, cocoa powder, baking powder and baking soda in a large bowl, stir to combine. Add the salt, sugar, eggs and sour cream, whisk together, then slowly whisk in the melted butter and hot water (so you don’t cook the eggs!) Stir until completely smooth. Divide the batter between the three prepared cake pans.

Bake for 25-30 minutes until the center is set and a test knife comes out clean. Let the cakes cool for 10 minutes in their pans before inverting them onto a cooling rack. Let cakes cool completely, wrap in plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least an hour before assembling. Cakes can be made ahead and refrigerated.

The Cherries

You could buy brandied cherries and use straight from the jar but I couldn’t find any. I had frozen cherries so this is how to prepare either frozen or fresh cherries.

• 1 pound frozen cherries (defrosted in refrigerator)

• 1 cup brandy

• 1/2 cup water

• 1/4 cup sugar

Add the cherries, brandy, water, and sugar to a small saucepan and heat over medium until the sugar has dissolved. Simmer for 15 minutes and remove from stove, allow to cool and refrigerate in sealed container. 

The Mascarpone Whipped Cream Frosting

• 1 cup mascarpone

• 1 cup heavy whipping cream

• 1 tablespoon granulated sugar

• 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

Beat together the mascarpone, whipping cream, sugar, and vanilla extract in the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with a whisk attachment at medium high speed until fluffy, about 1 to 2 minutes. Refrigerate until ready to use.

The Ganache

• 2 ounces dark chocolate, chopped finely (or semi-sweet chocolate chips)

• 1/4 cup heavy cream

• Plus more dark chocolate for shaving on top of cake later

Place the chopped chocolate in a bowl. Heat the cream over a medium heat until just simmering, then pour over the chocolate, allow the chocolate to melt for a bit then whisk briskly until well combined. Set aside. (this should be your last step in cooking before assembling the cake)

Assemble!

Place your first layer of cake on a cake stand or plate. Spread a good amount, about 1/2” thick with the mascarpone frosting. Top that with almost half the brandied cherries. Place your second layer of cake and repeat with mascarpone frosting and cherries, but leaving a few cherries aside for the final top, unless you have extra fresh or jarred cherries to use. Place your final cake layer on top of that, then pour on the ganache, let it dribble down the sides of the cake. Add some chocolate shavings on top (a vegetable peeler works great for shavings) and add the remaining cherries. Chill well, at least an hour, before slicing. It’s kind of a mess, but a good mess!

Photo by Jeff McDonald

Stone Fruit Galette

Stone Fruit Galette. This came out so good I wanted to share it with you here on the blog. With summer fruit in its prime right now there is no better time to make this. You can use any combination of fruit, but I highly recommend doing a mix of peaches, nectarines, plums, cherries and apricots. And I also recommend this pie crust that I made a couple months ago, it’s so flaky and soft, it’s more like a pastry and works so perfect with this fruit. The difference is cake flour!

On the home front here, our vegetable garden is just getting started with some green tomatoes here and there, squash and peppers are still too small to pick, but the raspberry bush has been a real bounty, I’ve been picking and flash freezing almost daily, they taste so good on their own but I’d like to make something, maybe a jam or a tart. If this doesn’t get eaten within a day (how is that possible? ha ha) you’ll need to refrigerate the galette. I hope you are having a great summer, or winter depending on where you are in the world (hello Australia!). Enjoy!

Stone Fruit Galette

• 3 cups stone fruit (peaches, nectarines, plums, cherries, apricots) sliced

• 1/3 cup sugar

• 4 tablespoons cornstarch

• 1/4 teaspoon cardamom

• 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon 

• 1 pie crust (recipe here)

Preheat oven to 400°F. Cut the fruit to about 1” pieces, save a few slices aside to arrange on the top. Place the cut fruit in a bowl along with the sugar, cornstarch and spices. Set aside. Roll out your dough to a 13” round.  Place the dough on a parchment lined baking sheet or in a cast-iron skillet. Spoon the filling onto the dough, leaving a 2-inch border around the edge. Fold the edges up and over the filling, forming loose pleats. Top with remaining fruit slices and cherry halves. Bake until the filling is bubbling and the pastry is golden brown, about 30-40 minutes. 

New Year’s Cherry Bourbon Cocktail

I was poking around our bookcase the other day and came across the book Imbibe! which I’ve never read, and still haven’t. But it did get me googling the author’s name David Wondrich, which brought me to Imbibe Magazine’s website (what a great site!) There are so many cocktail recipes it’s hard to pick one. I chose “The Dewberry Hotel’s Panic Button” definitely not for it’s name (although it's not hard to imagine a cocktail being named as such in 2017) but that it contained bourbon and two liqueurs that I’ve been wanting to try out for a long time. Amaro Averna, an Italian digestif, and Heering Cherry liqueur. I made the drink exact to the recipe, but it didn’t look like the drink in the article, however it tastes really good. Jeff thought it was sweet, but I didn’t find it too sweet, lots of earthy flavors with a taste of cherry that’s not overwhelming. I recommend using a large ice cube since they melt much slower than traditional ice cubes, here I used Tovolo Sphere ice molds, we have similar size large cube trays but these seemed to work nice for this style glass, plus they look like snow balls. Oh and just about the best maraschino cherries I’ve ever tasted are Bada Bing Cherries. Wishing you all well for the new year! Goodbye 2017, you were a really weird year. Cheers to 2018!

New Year’s Cherry Bourbon Cocktail

• 1 1/2 ounce Bourbon
• 3/4 ounce Amaro Averna
• 1/2 ounce Campari
• 1/2 ounce Heering cherry liqueur
• 1/4 ounce fresh lemon juice
• Large ice cubes or spheres
• Maraschino cherries

Shake all the ingredients with ice to chill, then strain into a glass holding a single large ball or cube of ice. Garnish with cherry.

Recipe adapted from Imbibe Magazine