But she's a young thing and cannot leave her mother

While other similarities to this famous lady of song may be lacking, it turns out that I can also bake a cherry pie.

I had found an intriguing recipe here earlier this summer.

When I found cherries on sale at the local grocery store, I had just the project in mind.

After sorting the good cherries from the bad (there was a reason they were on sale), I began the rather tedious and violent  task of disemboweling the cherries.

Ok, ok, I just took the pits out, but you have to admit, disemboweling is an apt description with all that red juice.

Here are the cherries (about 4 cups worth - I had enough to double the recipe) with a cup of water.

Here they are after I added a cup of sugar and 1/4 cup of cornstarch.  In retrospect, these cherries were pretty sweet and probably didn't need that much sugar.

Here's the pie crust on a sheet pan with the filling in the middle.  I also need to get better at making pie crusts. They never quite turn out as I would like.

All folded up, painted with egg, sprinkled with sugar, and ready to go!

Bubbling in the oven...

...and here's the finished product!

I wouldn't call it a screaming success, but for my first attempt at any sort of cherry pie, it wasn't too bad.

Poppy Seed Cake

Once upon a time, when I was at camp, we decided we needed to make some Poppy Seed Bread for a staff dessert. So, we did some research and came up with something that looked like a decent recipe. We tried it out, and it turned out fairly well, all things considered. In other words, it tasted good, but there were a number of other problems:

1. We had enough bread pans for staff, but probably not enough for a whole camp, thus making it rather impractical.
2. I always have problems with quick breads. They always seem to fall and never come out of the pans properly. Same problem here. Tasted good, looked terrible.
3. The recipe didn't have enough poppy seeds to really be considered poppy seed bread.

Thus, the next time we tried it, we put the batter into a large sheet pan (or two) and made more of a cake/bar dessert. We also added more poppy seeds. :) It turned out really well and was very popular with the staff and campers.

I made it the other day for my students, and they seemed to enjoy it. I'll include the recipe here. Yeah, not terribly healthy, but yummy. :)

Poppy Seed Cake (Bread)

3 c. flour

1 ½ tsp salt

2 ½ c. sugar

1 ½ tsp vanilla

1 ½ c milk

1 ½ c. oil

½ c. poppy seeds (or more or less to taste)

3 eggs

1 ½ tsp almond extract

Glaze:

¾ c. powdered sugar

¼ c. Orange or Lemon Juice

½ tsp vanilla

½ tsp almond

Mix all ingredients together. Originally this was a bread recipe:

Bake in 2 loaf pans (oiled and floured) at 350 for 1 ½ hours.

Remove loaves from pans and glaze.

However, we found that it works well as a cake. The above amount could be baked in a sheet pan or a 9”x13” pan at the same temperature for a much shorter time (I think about 20-30 min) – until a toothpick comes out clean (probably won't be brown yet). Then glaze.

You probably could also make muffins.