For personal reasons, I needed an image of a hockey stop and I wasn’t happy with the clip art options I was finding in the usual places one finds clipart. So, I made my own in Adobe Illustrator. It’s a little quick and dirty. You might notice that the two skates are just copies of each other, for example. (I really should have drawn a unique second skate at a slightly different angle. And maybe added a shadow.) But it still gets the point across better than the clipart I was finding.
As mentioned earlier, I have a lot of frozen sour cherries in my freezer. And I mean a lot. They’re inherited from my late father-in-law who had a sour cherry tree. My go-to for excessive amounts of free fruit is to make pie out of them. So, here, for Thanksgiving, is my recipe for sour cherry pie.
This recipe uses instant tapioca because it’s absolutely magic. It works way better than flour as a thickener for acidic fruit. It’s a chemistry thing.
Note that the extracts are very nice, but optional. I currently have an overabundance of vanilla extract that I’m trying to use up. And almond extract is nice to use if you have it, but I wouldn’t expect you to make a special trip to the store if you have everything else.
Ingredients
1 cup sugar 1/4 cup instant tapioca 1 tbsp. lemon juice 1/4 tsp. almond extract (optional) 1/2 tsp. vanilla extract (optional) 4 cups thawed, well-drained, pitted sour cherries 1 double pie crust (I use one frozen and one refrigerated roll-out.) 1/4 cup or so of water 1 egg, beaten (optional) A little extra sugar for sprinkling on top (optional)
Instructions
Preheat oven to 400°F.
Pull out the pie crusts to warm up a bit on the counter.
Mix first 5 ingredients in large bowl. A pastry blender works well.
Add cherries and toss until coated.
Let mixture sit 10-15 minutes.
If your bottom pie crust isn’t already in a pie pan, do that now.
Place pie pan on cookie or jelly roll pan. The filling will probably bubble over when you bake it, so you might line pan with foil. This pan catches the mess.
Poke holes in bottom of bottom crust with fork.
Pre-bake the bottom crust for 4-5 minutes or so. This prevents a doughy bottom crust, but can make adhesion with the top crust difficult if baked too long. (Might adjust time based on type of pie pan.)
Fill crust with cherry mixture.
If needed, brush edge of crust with a little water to soften for better adhesion.
Position top crust and crimp edges with fork.
Trim excess crust. (Trimmed parts can be rolled out and cut into decorative shapes and stuck to top crust with a bit of water, if you want.)
Cut vent holes in top crust.
Optional: Brush top crust with egg. Sprinkle sugar over top crust.
Cover crust edges with foil or crust guard. Grease the crust guard to hopefully avoid sticking and then wish for the best.
Bake for 40 minutes.
Carefully remove crust guard and bake an additional 10 minutes. (If needed.)
My father-in-law recently passed away. My mother-in-law proceeded him in 2021. With both of them now passed, my husband and his siblings are in the midst of settling the estate, cleaning out the house, and selling most of it. Among other things, I inherited a freezer full of frozen sour cherries. There were gallons and gallons of them going back to 2019. Gary had a sour cherry tree in his yard and dutifully collected, pitted, and froze as much of the harvest as he could manage. But, since Cheryl had died earlier, he was not able to keep up on using them in baked goods. Heaven knows what he planned to do with them all, but they’re all mine now.
I already had a sour cherry pie recipe that works really well. (I’ll post that later.) But I wanted something other than just pie to do with them. So, I searched for a sour cherry muffin recipe on the internet and the first one in the search results (outside of the sponsored results section) was posted by a blogger who looks like she’s a cookbook author. The recipe was highly rated, and I followed the directions dutifully. To the author’s credit, it did make muffins. I’ll give her that. Unfortunately, the muffin part, between the cherries, tasted like nothing so much as plain buttermilk pancakes. Very floury buttermilk pancakes. I mean, it was adequate. But I’m not sure why it was at the top of Google’s search results.
With all those cherries in my freezer, I needed to do better. After looking through some other recipes and trying two test batches of my own version, I have a new recipe. Mine uses butter, almond extract, and a quarter cup of reserved cherry juice to give that batter some flavor. I creamed the butter with the sugar because replacing canola oil with butter can cause baked goods not to rise as well. Creaming softened butter with the sugar helps mitigate that. I also bumped the baking powder way up. (After confirming with other recipes that using more should be okay.) My muffins don’t rise super high, but they aren’t nearly as dense as the original recipe. If you want them even fluffier, you might try adding even more baking powder until you’re happy with them. Be warned, though. I’m not actually sure what happens if one uses too much baking powder.
WHY BUTTERMILK? The acidity activates the baking powder. It’s a chemistry thing. The cherry juice might be enough on its own because it’s also acidic, but I’m not sure. The original recipe used buttermilk and I just stuck with that.
ELECTRIC MIXER: You will need an electric mixer to cream the butter. A simple hand mixer is sufficient. If you want to use a spoon instead of a mixer, you can skip the creaming step, but the muffins will come out denser. You can also substitute an equal amount of canola oil for the butter, which will make the mixture a little easier to stir by hand, and will rise better, but it will contribute less flavor.
VARIATION: If you want to make chocolate chunk sour cherry muffins, replace up to half the cherries with the same amount of semi-sweet chocolate baking chunks. Fold them in along with the cherries.
FANCY: The original recipe called for 2 Tbsp. of sanding sugar as an optional topping sprinkled on after the batter is spooned into the muffin cups and before you put it in the oven. My grocery store does not carry sanding sugar, so I did without. You can try that if you want.
Chocolate Cherry Muffins
Sour Cherry Muffins
Ingredients
3/4 cups reduced fat buttermilk 1/4 cup reserved cherry juice 1 large egg 1/2 tsp. almond extract 2/3 cup softened, salted butter 1 cup sugar 2 cups all-purpose flour 2 1/2 tsp. baking powder 2 cups sour cherries (pitted, thawed, very well-drained)
Instructions
Preheat oven to 350° F.
Line standard-sized cupcake/muffin pan with paper or foil liners. Recipe yields 18-20 muffins.
Mix wet ingredients (buttermilk, cherry juice, egg, almond extract) in a bowl.
Cream butter and sugar in a bowl. Use an electric mixer on medium speed for 1-2 minutes until well combined and sort of fluffy.
Combine wet ingredients into creamed butter and sugar mixture.
Slowly add remaining dry ingredients (flour and baking powder). Mix on medium speed until well incorporated.
Fold in cherries.
Spoon batter into muffin cups. Fill 3/4 full.
Bake for 30 minutes but check at 25 minutes just to be sure. Muffins will be done when top is beginning to turn golden brown and an inserted toothpick comes out clean of batter.
Let rest a few minutes. When cool enough to handle, transfer to a cooling rack.
I play D&D, and we’re starting a new campaign. This is my new character. Trili Pebbletock is a gnome bard living in Water Deep. She has spent the last 3 decades working a day job as a music teacher and oratory instructor for a noble family with regular side gigs as an entertainer in the evening. Unfortunately, a recent contract dispute has left her unable to work as an instructor anywhere within 50 miles of the city for the next 4 years. (Who ever heard of a non-compete clause?!) Then, to add insult to injury, while she was staying at The Willow Tree Inn, the establishment experienced a massive burglary. She was out entertaining at a local tavern and returned to find just about everything missing from her room, as did most of the other guests! But for her it was particularly devastating because she now has almost nothing to show for the past 3 decades of work! This has been absolutely the worst week of her entire life. Sitting at the bar at The Yawning Portal Tavern, she swears she has half a mind to take up with the next adventuring party that walks in the front door.
This is certainly a scary time for so many people. My heart goes out to everyone who’s been touched by this disease, and I hope that everyone reading this is safe and healthy.
Like all Kansans, I’m currently under stay-at-home orders, but everyone in my household is fine. My husband and I are both working from home, and we’re taking the recommended precautions the few times we do venture out in public. Since I normally work out of a home studio, nothing significant has changed in regards to my work process. I’m still taking commissions.
As always, if you have something for me to draw, I’d love to hear from you.
This one’s a lot ickier than I usually draw. But it’s a zombie. They’re inherently pretty icky. I think I’ll have to do something cute for tomorrow to wash the zombie stink off my stylus.
Here’s an inktober piece. I don’t think I’ll be doing the full challenge. I don’t have time to do one every day, but I will try to do several throughout the month.
Karen B. Jones - Illustrator 