Summer is here and with it comes many opportunities to
explore and indulge in activities that you find impossible to do other times throughout the year. On
our first day of summer, I decided to take my step-daughter strawberry and
cherry picking – something neither of us had done before. We went in the
morning on an overcast day to explore a local orchard.
The orchard was absolutely lovely, even with impending rain.
We explored endless rows of green trees dotted with deep red cherries. We
carefully plucked the trees until we had about 3 lbs. We then
traveled to a large, wide, open field filled with rows of strawberry bushes.
Finding the strawberries was like searching for treasure because the
strawberries were not as visible, hidden by their leafy green stems. We picked
about 4 lbs. of strawberries and made our way home.
Finding something to do with the strawberries was easy. We
made angel food cake and had strawberry shortcake for dessert. We also made
strawberry freezer jam, something little hands were happy to help with. Of
course simply popping the strawberries into our mouths for a snack was also
more than sufficient.
However, the cherries were a little more challenging. Our
family enjoys eating cherries untainted, but I wanted to try baking something
with them. So, I went to our local library and searched their selection of
cookbooks until I found a tempting recipe to try.
I stumbled across a book entitled Best of the Best. This book was created by the editors of Food and
Wine Magazine. The editors cooked recipes from 25 top cookbooks and then picked
their favorites to publish in this book. I found a recipe from Judith Sutton’s
book, Sweet Gratitude for Brown
Butter Cherry Tart – seriously, brown butter? How could this not be delicious?
I checked the book out and took it home.
With Father’s Day around the corner, I thought this tart
recipe would be the perfect dessert for the Father’s Day Dinner we were
hosting. The only unusual ingredient that the recipe called for was vanilla
bean. Luckily, there is a lady at our local Farmer’s Market that has vanilla
beans readily available so I able to locate and purchase them easily. (I was super excited! I have wanted to try to
cook with real vanilla beans for a while now and this recipe was the perfect
excuse!)
The tart’s ingredients and instructions are very simple. It
amazes me how sometimes the simplest of ingredients can combine effortlessly
into a delicious dish. The pastry was made easily in a food processor and was
moist and easy to work with. Not only did browning the butter for the filling
add a rich, nutty flavor to it, cooking the vanilla bean and its seeds in the
butter as it browned infused it with a velvety vanilla flavor. The cherries we
picked from the orchard were a little on the softer side, which added a juicy
sweetness to the cherries as they cooked. The result of this recipe was a tart
that had a delicious crust with a subtle crisp, filled with juicy cherries
covered in a sweet (but not overly sweet) filling that carmelized just slightly
in the oven. I would definitely make it again and would really like to try out
more of Judy Sutton’s recipes.
This recipe called for a 9 inch tart pan. I did not have a
large tart pan, but I did have small, 4 inch tart pans that I used instead. If
you choose to make individual tarts instead of 1 large tart, I would recommend
cutting the filling recipe in half. I had a lot of the vanilla brown butter and
cherries left over. I look forward to trying out this recipe again using other
fruits, such as blueberries and peaches.
So, when it comes to recipe organization, I am a bit of a
nut. I am very picky about how recipes are written and designed. My background
is in art and I often find that I am disappointed by recipe layouts in cook
books – words are too small, recipes are too wordy, font choice is rather
hum-drum, and they often lack color. Due to this, I design my recipes following
a prescribed format that I created on Microsoft Word. However, for this blog, I
decided I wanted to try to create recipe cards to easily share recipes. These cards have been scaled to
5” X 7”. I know most recipe cards are 4” X 6”, but I needed something a little
larger. These cards can be printed out easily on card stock and can be stored
in an index card box or even a 5” X 7” photo album. If needed you could shrink
the jPEG to 4” X 6”.
I hope you enjoyed this posting and the recipe card. Cheers
to cherries and happy baking!
