Fruit Trials

The fruit is ripening faster than I can keep up with it. Sweet and sour cherries will be done soon but now the blueberries are ripe. I’ve spent the morning pitting sour cherries. I have several recipes to try and time is short if I want to use fresh cherries.
My first attempt, a Cherry Custard Pie, wasn’t very successful. The recipe calls for baking the cherries in an unbaked pie shell for twenty minutes and then adding a mixture of eggs and heavy cream. Sounds great but one little problem, the amount of cherries called for didn’t fill the pan. The oven heat caused the pastry to slide down the slope of the pie pan so that when I tried to add the custard, there was no crust to put it in. I added it anyway. Now I’m waiting for it to cool to see what turned out. There’s another pie in the oven, hopefully it will turn out right.
After all the years I’ve been cooking it is always a surprise when a recipe that looks like it would be so good ends up not that great. Even failures are usually edible but I want the recipes to be more than just edible.
One of the strawberry recipes looked spectacular and tasted good but wasn’t worth the work. First a cake batter in the bottom of the pan, then a meringue spread over that. It was baked at 350 for twenty minutes. Meringue is usually baked in a low oven for an hour to make it crispy. This one turned out like sponge and pretty tasteless. The cake, berries and cream saved the dessert but another time I’d make separate meringues to layer with the cake and berries.
Pretty impressive looking though.