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So it's cherry season here in castle gresley.
For some reason, about every 3rd year the birds, ants, wasps etc leave the cherry tree alone and the tree itself goes into mental overdrive.
I've picked 8lb of cherries in the last two days - and there's at least as many still to ripen.
So mass cherries means cherry pie - almost exactly three years ago I made this.
This year I decided to ignore the big pie and go for little dainty ones :-)
First job stone the cherries
For the filling:
1 lb 4 oz stoned cherries
2 oz vanilla sugar
2 tbs cornflour
1 tsp mixed spice
Put into food processor
And blitz to a coarse paste
Put into the fridge to chill while you make the pastry.
pastry recipe. This is a rich very-short crust pastry.
4oz plain (all purpose - though it isn't really) flour
4 oz self raising flour
4 oz butter
1 oz vanilla sugar
about .5 tsp grated nutmeg
1 very large or 2 small eggs - beaten
add flour and sugar and nutmeg to bowl add butter cut into small pieces and rub till it resembles fine breadcrumbs. You can also do this in a food processor - but I like to get my hands sticky
Mix in the beaten egg.
Now if you're doing this in 30c heatwave - you won't need to add any cold water as the egg will prove sufficient with the melted butter.
Otherwise mix in the egg and then add a little cold water to form a soft pastry - mixing as little as possible (which is the key to shortcrust pastry). Pop into the fridge to chill for a hour or so.
Roll out thin, flouring repeatedly and generously, this is a very soft pastry and will stick if not floured sufficiently.
Alternatively buy ready made pastry - but make sure it's made with butter not some unnamed grease they squeezed out of a dead pig :-)
Cut into the correct size round for your moulds.
Fill the cases with the chilled filling to the top and then add a whole stoned cherry.
(not sure how rich managed to sneak this picture into my camera)
Bake in the centre of a PRE-HEATED (yeah i know should have mentioned it earlier - but then you should always read a recipe through before making it) oven. Gas mark 6/400f/200c for 10 minutes. This is to set the base of the tarts.
Reduce the temp to gas mark 4/350f/180c for approx another 20 minutes or until the pastry case has darkened very slightly toa light biscuit colour.
Give them 10 minutes then remove and place on cooling rack.
Then eat :-)
Seriously good. went down extremely well at tai-chi and the few remaining were swiftly disposed of this morning by a visitor :-)
Now when you consider that shop bought cherry pie filling is 40-60% sugar and bugger all cherry content. You can imagine how different this filling is.
For the record the filling and pastry amount is actually sufficient to make 48 tarts this size. I'll make the other 24 tomorrow.
If I were to use this filling in a large pie I would use half filling and mix it in with half whole stoned cherries cut in half (that's a lot of halves :-)
Glad i rooted out the last cherry pie posting - I'd forgotten about the cherry milkshake
Oh yeah, it's compulsory:
[yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlQp8dQ67eU[/yt]
For some reason, about every 3rd year the birds, ants, wasps etc leave the cherry tree alone and the tree itself goes into mental overdrive.
I've picked 8lb of cherries in the last two days - and there's at least as many still to ripen.
So mass cherries means cherry pie - almost exactly three years ago I made this.
This year I decided to ignore the big pie and go for little dainty ones :-)
First job stone the cherries
For the filling:
1 lb 4 oz stoned cherries
2 oz vanilla sugar
2 tbs cornflour
1 tsp mixed spice
Put into food processor
And blitz to a coarse paste
Put into the fridge to chill while you make the pastry.
pastry recipe. This is a rich very-short crust pastry.
4oz plain (all purpose - though it isn't really) flour
4 oz self raising flour
4 oz butter
1 oz vanilla sugar
about .5 tsp grated nutmeg
1 very large or 2 small eggs - beaten
add flour and sugar and nutmeg to bowl add butter cut into small pieces and rub till it resembles fine breadcrumbs. You can also do this in a food processor - but I like to get my hands sticky
Mix in the beaten egg.
Now if you're doing this in 30c heatwave - you won't need to add any cold water as the egg will prove sufficient with the melted butter.
Otherwise mix in the egg and then add a little cold water to form a soft pastry - mixing as little as possible (which is the key to shortcrust pastry). Pop into the fridge to chill for a hour or so.
Roll out thin, flouring repeatedly and generously, this is a very soft pastry and will stick if not floured sufficiently.
Alternatively buy ready made pastry - but make sure it's made with butter not some unnamed grease they squeezed out of a dead pig :-)
Cut into the correct size round for your moulds.
Fill the cases with the chilled filling to the top and then add a whole stoned cherry.
(not sure how rich managed to sneak this picture into my camera)
Bake in the centre of a PRE-HEATED (yeah i know should have mentioned it earlier - but then you should always read a recipe through before making it) oven. Gas mark 6/400f/200c for 10 minutes. This is to set the base of the tarts.
Reduce the temp to gas mark 4/350f/180c for approx another 20 minutes or until the pastry case has darkened very slightly toa light biscuit colour.
Give them 10 minutes then remove and place on cooling rack.
Then eat :-)
Seriously good. went down extremely well at tai-chi and the few remaining were swiftly disposed of this morning by a visitor :-)
Now when you consider that shop bought cherry pie filling is 40-60% sugar and bugger all cherry content. You can imagine how different this filling is.
For the record the filling and pastry amount is actually sufficient to make 48 tarts this size. I'll make the other 24 tomorrow.
If I were to use this filling in a large pie I would use half filling and mix it in with half whole stoned cherries cut in half (that's a lot of halves :-)
Glad i rooted out the last cherry pie posting - I'd forgotten about the cherry milkshake
Oh yeah, it's compulsory:
[yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlQp8dQ67eU[/yt]
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