Weekend Treats #1: Cherry Pie

I have been busy all the time and now all of a sudden I have whole weekend with kind of nothing... the strange thing is that I am still in that efficiency mode. So instead of relaxing and doing nothing (which I used to be extremely good at!), I keep looking around to see what can be done. Fun things of course. I am not cleaning my house on my free weekend, are you crazy?

So I found some good things to do. One was finishing that mosaic piece I made at a workshop last week. The workshop lasted three hours, my piece took about 7. Why make it easy on yourself? I'll show you when it's all finished. It still needs a finishing touch. By then the day was half gone. 

So I went to the supermarket to get the ingredients for the mouth watering red curry recipe I wanted to make (yes, it's a candidate for the Recipe Cards pt. 2). I also wanted to make a nut bread a friend gave me the recipe of. Spending about 30 minutes searching for ingredients they didn't have, I changed the plan. Instead of baking that nut bread, I decided to bake a cherry pie! 

It turned out great, so I want to share the recipe with you. It doesn't take a million ingredients and it won't take you hours. Maybe one. But you'll be proud of the result. 

This what you need: 

- 300 grams of all purpose flour

- 6 tbsp of sugar

- a little salt

- 1 tbsp of butter

- 7 grams of dry yeast

- 150 ml of milk

- A jar (700 grams) of cherries in syrup

- 1 tbsp of corn starch

- dry breadcrums

- 1 egg

- a little sugar for decoration

And this is how you make it:

Mix the flour, 2 tbsp of sugar and a bit of salt in a bowl. Warm the milk (not hot, just warm), dissolve the butter and the yeast in it and add to the flour. Knead it all together untill you have smooth ball of dough. Let it rest in a warm place for about 30 minutes. Preheat the oven at 175 degrees.

Separate the cherries and the syrup. Put the syrup in a pan with 4 tbsp of sugar. Bring to a boil. Mix the corn starch with one tbsp of cold water and add to the syrup. Let it boil until it starts to thicken. Mix in the cherries. Take of the heat. The mixture will become thicker when it cools down. 

Roll out half of your dough, big enough to fill your pie plate (mine is ø 30 cm). Put it on the plate and cover the dough with the breadcrums. Put a piece of lining paper on top and fill with marbles or baking beans (blind baking). Put it in the oven for 15 minutes. 

Rol out the other half of the dough and take out little diamond shaped pieces. I used a piece of firm paper / carton that I folded into a square. I like it if it looks homemade, so no need to worry if it's all symmetrical. 

Remove the baking beans and the lining paper from the pie plate. Pour the cherries onto the pie bottom and cover with the second half of dough. Brush some egg on the top and sprinkle with sugar. Put in the (still preheated) oven for 25 minutes. Et voila!