Friday, August 7, 2009

Yum cherries

Does this ever happen to you? You see all these great recipes for let's say, goat cheese and then you get the goat cheese and your like where are all those recipes that I was going to make with goat cheese. So then you do a search, internet and or cookbooks and you still can not find a recipe that appeals to you, using goat cheese.
Hate that.

Cherries here have been horrible this year. There was so much rain that they were about ready to burst off the vine. Cherry explosions around the orchard. And because there was so much rain and little sun there was not much flavor or sweetness to the cherries. Enter the Washington cherry. Rainier. Thank goodness. We ate so many. I canned them and I baked with them. Here's a little yum for yah!

Cherry Brown Butter Tart
Smitten Kitchen
and the original from Epicurious can be found here.

Crust:
7 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted
1/3 cup sugar
1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 cup plus 1 tablespoon all purpose flour
Pinch of salt

Filling:
1/2 cup sugar
2 large eggs
Pinch of salt
1/4 cup all purpose flour
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, diced
1 pound sweet cherries, which will yield 12 ounces of pitted cherries, which yielded some leftovers, perfect for snacking (alternately, you can use 12 ounces of the berry of your choice)

Make crust: Preheat oven to 375°F.

Using rubber spatula or fork, mix melted butter, sugar, and vanilla in medium bowl. Add flour and salt and stir until incorporated. Transfer dough to a tart pan, and use your fingertips to press the dough evenly across the bottom of the pan. Bake the crust until golden, about 18 minutes. Transfer crust to rack and cool in pan. Maintain oven temperature.

Make the filling: Cook butter in heavy small saucepan (a lighter-colored one will make it easier to see the color changing, which happens quickly) over medium heat until deep nutty brown (do not burn), stirring often and watching carefully, about six minutes. Immediately pour browned butter into glass measuring cup to cool slightly.

Whisk sugar, eggs, and salt in medium bowl to blend. Add flour and vanilla and whisk until smooth. Gradually whisk browned butter into sugar-egg mixture; whisk until well blended.

Arrange pitted cherries, or the berries of your choice, in bottom of cooled crust. Carefully pour browned butter mixture evenly over the fruit. Bake tart until filling is puffed and golden and tester inserted into center comes out clean, about 40 minutes. Cool tart completely in pan on rack.

Do ahead: Can be made at least a day ahead, and stored at room temperature. Any longer, keep them cool in the fridge.

* Next time, because my cherries were so big, I think I would have cut them in half. Or I could make this when raspberries are in season, yum.

* If you are wondering why mine are bars, I simply cut the tart into bars because we ended up taking it over some friends house.

11 comments:

kat said...

Those sound so heavenly!

Selba said...

Oh Lori... your Cherry tart looks so scrumptious! I wish cherries are available easily here in Indonesia. And I think you don't need to cut it into half next time because it's just perfect :)

Marta said...

We're overflowing with cherries here! This looks like a lovely way to use them up. What I do is print/bookmark the recipes I want to try. I started doing that after losing too many of them!

Barbara Bakes said...

Definitely lipsmacking good!

Ingrid_3Bs said...

MMMMMMMmmmmmm, that looks good and you knew you had me when you were typing brown butter, right?! :)
~ingrid

Murasaki Shikibu said...

"Does this ever happen to you? You see all these great recipes for let's say, goat cheese and then you get the goat cheese and your like where are all those recipes that I was going to make with goat cheese..."

YES. This happens to me a lot. ;)

Donna-FFW said...

Lori.. this sounds delicious and I love your idea of raspberries in it also. Bet blueberries would be delish also!!

Unknown said...

oh man, I want one of these immediately.

sara/imafoodblog.com

grace said...

so sorry the cherries in your area have been disappointing! i've been loving them this summer, and this is a splendid use for the little red orbs. :)

Lynn said...

These look really delicious. Too bad I've already eaten most of the cherries I bought the other day. Hmmm, maybe I'll have to get more . . . Thanks for sharing this.

LittleRed said...

This looks just beautiful. I may have to go grab some cherries before the season is over:)