Summer Sunday: Cherry Cake

What do you do when you've got a bag of Bing cherries that are a bit past the perfect stage of fresh to eat as they are? You make cake. You make cake in a pie plate, to be exact.

This recipe is good, quick, and easy. You can really put on the dog with a scoop of cherry ice cream, though I like whipped cream on my fruit cakes. This is good with blackberries too, or any fruit that gives up a lot of juice when it bakes.

Let me correct myself. The CAKE is good, quick, and easy. If you're going with cherries for this baby, you need to either go with a bag of frozen ones, or pit your own. I hope you have a cherry pitter, or a system, because I had neither.

I used to have a little plastic one cherry-one pit sort of gadget, and it did the job, though it was hardly sufficient to knocking out a few cases of fresh cherries for jam or pie filling. It must have been one of those untold dozens of little insignificant items I lost in the divorce. Insignificant, that is, until I needed to pit myself some cherries.

Pitting cherries. It only looks like murder.

Looking on line, I found little hints like using a bent paper clip or using a pastry tip to get the pits out, but they were all equally messy and none of them as good as simply bisecting the cherry with my good paring knife and flicking the pit out with the blade tip. The rest of it was easy as, well, cake. It's Warm Almond-Cherry Cake, and you can find the recipe on Martha Stewart's website here. Add it to your list of go-to recipes for summer and for company.