Happy belated F ourth, Americans all! Our wonderful holiday included a bright-and-early baseball practice, neighborhood bike parade and picnic, afternoon swimming for the kids, a home fireworks show, and meeting up with wonderful knitter Cindy and her family for the big fireworks display.
Belle and her decorated scooter.
Hope you all had a happy and safe day!
Sour Cherry Pie
While the kids went to the pool, I got to spend the afternoon doing one of my very favorite things; cooking up dessert. The kids have been busy picking cherries form our one little tree, which keeps making more and more fruit every year. The first season, we got a couple of handfuls, which I made into little sherry tarts. This year, we’ve already made ice cream (recipe tomorrow!) and cherry sauce, and now pie. Our neighbor’s mom, visiting from Hungary, picked some, too, and then brought over a welcome gift of a chunk of vanilla-lemon cake studded with sour cherries. Wow, it was delicious. I’m going to have to get a translation of that recipe!
For our Fourth of July Cherry Pie, I used this Epicurious Sour Cherry Pie Recipe. The only thing I did differently was to use 2.25 cups of flour, making the dough easier to roll out.
The pie was slated to be pretty sour, so I took Epicurious’ advice and served it with homemade vanilla ice cream. Once we get our ice cream maker out for the season, whipping up ice creams is a snap! I just whisked together 1.5 cups whole milk, 1.5 cups cream, 1 cup sugar and 1.5 T vanilla, poured it in the machine and set the timer for 25 minutes.
We ate the pie before it was really set, because we had firework time constraints, but the warm sour pie next to the cold, sweet ice cream made for a pretty nice holiday treat.
I don’t have any photos, but with the leftover pie crust, I made a rustic tart about as big as my hand, with a thick layer of Nutella on the bottom and a layer of sour cherries nestled into it, with a couple of dabs of butter on top. I pinched the edges together so it overlapped the filling by about an inch on all sides, to keep everything safely inside. It baked for about 40 minutes on 375 degrees. It could have probably come out a bit earlier, but the crust was flaky and crunchy and pretty tasty.
In knitting news, I’m developing patterns for the All Wrapped Up Yarn Club and Gradient Club, which is lots of fun, but of course, secret.
Some new Fall shawl patterns are coming along nicely, too; though I had to start this one three times for it to come out right.
Hope you’re all staying cool,
Jaala
knitcircus 