Homemade Cherry Pie

This lovers cherry pie is the perfect Valentines Day dessert! Golden brown, sugar crusted pastry jam packed with sweet vanilla cherries. You can use fresh or frozen cherries to ensure you can make this beautiful pie all year round.

I love pie, all kinds of pie, I don’t discriminate. I even said to Kris when we were still planning on a proper wedding that I wanted wedding pie instead of wedding cake. Instead we Eloped to New York, I still got my pie though (thanks Four and Twenty Blackbirds).

Cherry pie is right up there in my pie hierarchy, it sits just below Lemon Meringue and Key Lime. Sadly, you rarely see it on menus in the UK, at least in the bit I’m from. I guess that means I have to make it for myself, self sufficiency baby!

You can use any kind of cherries you can find for this pie. I like to use fresh but frozen work just as well. You may need to cook the filling a little longer to make up for the extra water content in the frozen cherries but they’re just as delicious.

Making your own pie crust might seem a little daunting, with a long list of instructions and demands. I promise you, after that first time you’ll never go back to store bought again. It’s actually very simple once you understand how the crust behaves. The key things to remember are:

• Don’t over work the crust! This activates the gluten and makes the pastry tough.
• Make sure everything is super cold, cold water, cold butter, cold hands.
• Don’t add too much water. You might be tempted to add more water when you’re bringing the dough together, fight that urge. It doesn’t matter that the dough is a little shaggy with dry bits. As long as it holds together when it’s pinched you’re good to go. Adding too much water causes the liquid in the crust to evaporate while baking which will result in your beautifully crimped pie crust, shrinking!
• Always egg wash your crust! It’s essential to getting that beautiful golden hue.
• A sprinkling of sugar is optional but bloody delicious! I never skip this step on a double crusted pie.

Tips for making Cherry Pie:

• Pitting Cherries – I’d really advise buying a cherry pitter for this job. If you don’t have a pitter here’s an easy (but slightly time consuming) method where all you need is a chopstick and an empty bottle. Hold the cherry over the bottle neck and push the chopstick through the cherry till you feel the pit, give it a tough push and pop the pit out the bottom and into the bottle.
• Cherries – You can use frozen cherries in this pie in place of fresh. Just cook them from frozen as you would the fresh. This is perfect for when you want to make this pie out of season.
• Browning the crust – If you find the crust is browning too much during cooking place a tent of tin foil over the pie and continue to cook as normal.
• Crimping – Crimping a pie for the first time can be a little tricky (and really difficult to describe in text) so her’s a link to a good crimping guid that really helped me out the first time I tried it. Crimping
• Freezing – You can freeze this full pie for up to two months. Just wrap in a double layer of cling film and pop in the freezer. Allow to defrost at room temperature.
• Serve it warm – You can warm individual slices of this pie up in the microwave for 30-40 seconds or you can warm the full pie in an oven preheated to 175C for 10 minutes. Ice cream is a must!

More pie recipes:

• Crack Pie
• Cinnamon Roll Topped Apple Pie
• Black Bottom Oatmeal Pie
• Salty Honey Pie
• Key Lime Pie (remind me to reshoot this one, haha!)

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