I generally don't like summer. Please don't throw stones at me northern hemisphere dwellers. Too hot, too many bugs and I hate mowing the lawn with the fury of a thousand suns. However, the one bright spot of it all is that there is finally fresh produce in the supermarket. My yearly summer ritual is to make peach cobbler and last weekend I really had a craving for some. Alas, I showed up to buy peaches and there were none to be had, although there was a giant mountain of red cherries. Not to be deterred I decided to still make cobbler just change the fruit.
This picture above is the result of half an hour of pitting and red stained hands. Seriously, even after scrubbing them it took a few days for the stains to come out. Pitting is also a long task since you have to do them one by one and since I usually cook more than one thing at once this cramped my style. I did emerge triumphant from my battle with the cherries and tossed them with some flour, sugar and cinnamon (because cinnamon goes with practically everything). I was concerned that the cherries wouldn't be sufficiently cooked enough so I put them in the oven for 15 minutes without the topping.
This is the wet topping. Not too exciting, I know. Just the basics-Baking powder
-Flour
-Sugar
-Cinnamon (which is why the colour is a bit weird)
-Milk
-Melted butter
This went on top of the half cooked cherries and the whole thing went in the oven for roughly half an hour.
The finished product. My kitchen smelled quite good at this point and I had a hard time resisting the urge to skip dinner and go straight to dessert.
One more shot of my cobbler along with some ice cream.I had never made cherry cobbler before but it was good. Honestly, I don't know if it was worth the work of all that pitting since I actually prefer peach cobbler anyways. If I did make it again I would maybe added a bit of water or juice to the cherries since they had a lot of pectin and the fruit part ended up being very thick. I am glad I tried it though, even if it was a bit long to make because of the prep work. Strangely enough even though I will spend hours cooking certain kind of prep work drives me insane (peeling potatoes comes to mind); I think pitting cherries has been added to that list.
