Cherry Tarts
The Cherry season has officially started in Switzerland and I have been very excited as cherries are one of my favourite fruits. To make the cherry season even more exciting we decided to go pick the cherries ourselves at Jucker Farm. Doing your own cherry picking is really a fun experience for young and old and you feel like you are working for your fresh fruits while spending some time in nature.
I had so many cherries once I got home and I felt like I needed to use some to make something sweet for the weekend so I decided to make these delicious Cherry Tarts. The size of the cherry tarts makes them a perfect sweet treat that doesn’t fill you too much - they are also not too sweet and go perfectly with some vanilla ice cream.
Prep Time: 15 Min + 1 Hour chill time for pastry
Cooking Time: 30 Min
Ingredients for 6 tarts - crust:
All purpose flour - 125g
Sugar - 1 Tbs
Butter - 110g - you can also use vegan butter
Water - As much as you need
Salt - Half a tea spoon
Ingredients for the filling
Cherries - 200g
Sugar - 2 Tbs
Cornstarch (Maizena) - 1.5 Tbs
Egg - one egg beaten (for painting)
How to:
Preheat the oven to 200C
In a bowl, mix the flour, salt, sugar and butter.
Work all the ingredients together with your hands. Add some cold water and continue working the pastry. This pastry is very buttery so it’s normal that it stays a bit sticky and doesn’t behave like other pastries that are more flour based.
After you have worked the pastry enough and it’s homogenous make a ball with it and leave it aside to chill for at least an hour. I have also made this recipe letting the pastry cool for only 15 minutes (you can do this but it will be harder to work).
While you wait for your pastry to chill you can take some time to clean and pit the cherries (the best technique is to cut them in half and remove the pits so that you have 2 even halves).
In a bowl, mix the cherries with with the sugar and the cornstarch.
Now you can go back to working your pastry. Lay out some flour and work it with a pastry pin. The dough should be quite thin but not transparent.
One you have laid it out, take a round pastry shaper (or if you don’t have one a small bowl) and start creating circles of pastry (you should be able to get around 6 with the amount we made). You can always roll up the dough again and lay it out for a second and third time.
Once you have your circles, place a spoonful of cherry mixture in the middle of each circle, leaving around 2cm on the edges.
With your hands gently fold the edges (you can squish the cherries a bit). Beat your egg and paint the pastries before putting them in the oven for 25-30 min at 200C.
While they are in the oven keep and eye on them and once they are golden brown you can remove them and put them aside to chill before serving them.
Enjoy :)