Late spring/early summer means the start of cherry time around here, so it’s finally time to make 16-36: Fresh Cherry Pie.
We watched Twin Peaks (all three seasons and the movie) a few months ago, and ever since, I’ve been craving a slice of damn fine cherry pie. Talk about synergy.
However, this is not quite Norma’s cherry pie…this is Simply Delicious’ cherry pie, so it of course has to include almond paste in some way. If you’re looking for Norma’s cherry pie (which is much closer to typical “cherry pie”), go here. Pour yourself a cup of coffee and watch some Twin Peaks while you’re at it–it’s awesome.
Funnily enough, Twin Peaks and Simply Delicious both exist as excellent representations of the late 1980s-early 1990s. There’s that synergy thing again.
I disagree with the TIPS–if it’s called “Fresh Cherry Pie”, you can’t use frozen cherries instead. That’s flagrant false advertising, man!
Ingredients, roughly divided by crust/filling (hence the two separate bowls of sugar).
Starting with the crust, since that needs to chill for a while.
Egg, separated.
Egg white whipped to soft peaks.
Note that I still have the balloon whisk attachment on the mixer at this point–I should have switched to the paddle at this point.
I thought I could cream this egg yolk and butter with the whisk, but it ended up just being kind of a mess. So, I switched to the paddle to try to save it.
The paddle smoothed it out enough–here’s after scraping the bowl down and dumping the sugar in. I only had the spatula in the bowl for the picture–the sugar itself got mixed in with the stand mixer.
The egg whites however? Those I folded in by hand with the spatula, because using the stand mixer (which is a machine, no matter how much you slow it down) would probably make them deflate a bit more than by doing it gently by hand. Now you see why I went to weird lengths to explain myself above.
The final sphere of dough, ready to be wrapped in plastic and chilled in my fridge for a while.
While the dough chills, let’s clean up, reset, and start working on preparing the filling components. Once the dough is ready, you’ll want everything else ready as well. First up–making the whipped cream.
And…it’s whipped cream.
I didn’t take pictures of it, but I put the almond paste through the food processor using the shredding disc and it resulted in the above. I tried grating by hand, but it was not going well, and we have much better tools for these things.
This whole recipe has been a struggle between when to use the hand tools for authenticity and precision, and when to use the machines for speed and efficiency–how apropos for our current times.
Speaking of which…how do you pit cherries? This is the best tool I’ve found so far…or is it a machine?
The bloody aftermath.
Another mistake–turns out to you need to line your pie crust with foil BEFORE you put the weights in. Otherwise, you get the following:
Apologies to those of you with trypophobia. It was not fun to pick all those weights back out of the of the par-baked crust.
The generous filling will cover this mess this time, but it’s not a mistake I’ll make again. Carrying on…
Now it’s time to start mixing all those filling components together.
Filling in all those holes…
Let us never speak of it again.
Covered the top with the pitted cherries, as instructed.
This felt like a LOT of sugar–I even cut back a little towards the end because it felt excessive.
Time for the oven…let’s see how this goes. I have the mat and pan underneath the pie pan in case there’s any leakage, plus it makes it easier to remove from the oven without sticking the thumbs of the oven mitt in the pie itself.
After baking. Most of the sugar baked in, but there’s still a few patches here and there. Not too much leakage on top, and none from the bottom that I can see so far.
I sliced this pie up into twelve-ish pieces (count them if you want) and wrapped all but two in plastic wrap. I tried to make sure each “piece” had a few cherries and some crust, but there’s definitely some that have more than others.
After wrapping. Now these get frozen (placed in my chest freezer on a sheet pan for a day or two) and then tossed in a bag to be defrosted and eaten one piece (per person) a week, instead of the whole pie in a week (or a few days). More lessons learned, you could say.
I did keep two pieces out to have for dessert…like they said, it’s FRESH cherry pie. And even though it’s not Norma’s, I’d still say it was damn fine.
Grade: A
