This cherry pie recipe is one of my favourite sweets to make for Sunday lunch. It's so easy to make and delicious to eat all of which means it’s my ideal comfort food, especially if you serve it with a scoop of vanilla ice cream. 

This version of cherry pie is made with a cherry conserve, instead of fresh cherries. This makes it quicker to bake and straightforward to prepare. You can have the whole recipe done at the same time as you are preparing your main meal.

What I love about this recipe, is that every time you buy cherry conserve, you can choose a different flavour, which changes the final taste of the pie. 

There are several types of cherry conserve, but most popular ones are made from black or morello cherries. Black Cherry Preserve is made with sweet dark cherries, which give the conserve a deep, rich flavour. On the other hand, Morrello Cherries are much sharper than black or red cherries but still have a strong cherry flavour. When choosing the right cherry conserve for your filling, make sure there is at least 50g of fruit for 100g of the total weight of the preserve so that the cherry flavour is strong enough to really enjoy when cooked through. 

I like to prepare my cherry pie filling by mixing the cherry conserve with lemon juice and seasonal spices, like cinnamon. If you like a less sharp flavour, you can add the cherry conserve as it is or add other ingredients. I'm sure dark chocolate, mixed spice or a pinch of ground nutmeg would work equally well!

My top tips on making cherry pie

• Choose the best quality jam or preserve, that's not too liquidy
• Don't overmix or over-handle your pastry. If you overwork your pastry, it can make your pie tough.
• If you have warm hands, it's best to mix the pastry with a fork to keep your dough cold.
• Make sure the pastry is properly chilled (at least 30 minutes, but can be left overnight in the fridge) before rolling it out. 
• Roll out the pastry between two large sheets of non-stick (greaseproof) baking paper. This is the easiest way to roll out the pastry without it sticking.

 Happy Baking!

Magdalena

Cherry Pie Recipe

Ingredients:

FOR THE PIE FILLING:

• 1 jar of Cherry Jam Preserve
• 1 teaspoon lemon juice
• 1/4 teaspoon of cinnamon

FOR THE PIE CRUST:

• 180 g unbleached plain (all-purpose) flour
• 1 tablespoon white caster sugar, add a little for topping
• A pinch of salt
• 225 g chilled unsalted butter
• 6 tablespoons (or more) cold water

Directions:

1. Preheat the oven to 180C or 380 F, gas mark 3
2. First, make the pie crust
3. Mix flour, sugar, and salt together in a large bowl. 
4. Cut up the butter into smaller pieces and add to the flour mixture. Work the butter with your hands into the flour until you get something resembling rough crumbs.
5. To turn it into pastry dough, add about 4 tablespoons of cold water and working now with a fork, mix everything together. Add more water if the dough is too dry, but don't overmix it. 
6. Divide your pastry dough into two pieces, flatten them a little, wrap in a plastic bag and chill for at least 30 minutes in the fridge. 
7. Whilst your pie dough is chilling in the fridge, prepare your pie filling.
8. Simply mix together your cherry preserve with lemon juice and cinnamon in a bowl and keep to one side.
9. When your pie dough is ready, roll out each piece to approximately 10-12 inch large circle.
10. Place one piece to a greased pie dish (slightly size than your pastry, so approx 8-9 inch) and trim the pastry leaving about 1/2 inch of pastry overhanging over the edge of your pie dish.
11. Fill the pie dish with the cherry pie filling, making sure that the dish is not overfilled and leaving about 1/4 of an inch from the top of the pie dish. 
12. Create the pie lattice from the second rolled out dough by cutting 1/2-3/4 inch ( about 2cm) wide strips. You can use a sharp kitchen knife for this or pastry wheel if you have one. Arrange the pie dough strips on top of your cherry pie by weaving them across each other and firmly pinch the sides or use the overhanging pastry to seal the pie. 
13. Trim any overhanging pastry with a sharp knife. 
14. Brush the pie crust with milk and sprinkle with sugar, before placing in the middle of the preheated oven. 
15. Bake for about 30 minutes until the pie crust is lightly brown.
16. Serve hot or cold with vanilla ice cream, cream or just on its own!

This chocolate sorbet recipe is perfect as a delicious dessert, but also suitable for dairy free diets. Because it's made without cream or milk, this sorbet is very light and the taste is amazing.

Whist the preparation time is very simple, you need to leave the sorbet to freeze for quite some time, so make sure you start your sorbet making the day before you want to serve it.

This recipe is very simple to make, and it's a real energy booster. Unlike normal chocolate brownie, this recipe has chocolate added in rather than mixed in. Because of the oats, this recipe is also slightly on a healthy side, if you can possibly count brownie recipe healthy at all!

My friend brought this recipe back from a recent trip to America, so the recipe is measured in cups. To be honest, I've started to bake more and more using cups as a measure, and it's surprisingly easy! I can even remember a few recipes without getting the cookery book out.

One question we often get asked during our sourdough bread baking class is 'Is sourdough bread good for weight loss?'.

Since we already know that swapping a home baked bread for shop bought is always a good idea, I wanted to find out more about the benefits of eating sourdough bread.

Author: Magdalena Marsden

This article was last updated on 5 May 2020

I've always been interested in traditional confectionery - pretty much all of my life I was on a quest for the perfect sweets, chocolates or bonbons. And I was always fascinated about the process of sweet's making and it was partly the reason why I founded Cocoa & Heartfew years back. All those demonstrations at seaside sweet's shops of how to make a stick of rock got me thinking, that perhaps I could have a go myself. And I did - successfully - made several batches of boiled sweets and now you can have a go too, following my step by step boiled sweets recipe tutorial.

Traditional Sweets & Chocolate Quiz

The best thing about running chocolate classes and making our own chocolate, is that our work involves a lot of chocolate and sweet tasting! We also love history, so what better way to combine these two together, than by putting together this chocolate quiz.

And if you are after a longer chocolate quiz, why not try my Chocolate Advertising Slogans Quiz with 30 different chocolate slogans to test your chocolate memory! 

Now, back to this chocolate quiz! So, obviously we can't see into your front room, so we rely on you not to cheat and take this quiz very seriously!!!

Pen and paper ready, off you go!

1. What chocolate bar was advertised as during World War II as giving war time volunteers ‘two hours of endurance capacity’?
2. Which bar was advertised in 1936 with the slogan ‘Don’t be angry, have a bar of chocolate’?

Bread Baking Questions and Answers

Why does my bread split on the top?

There could be number of reasons for this:

Oven too hot

Your oven could be too hot for the type of bread you are baking

No bread slashing

Inadequate or lack of bread slashing. When you slash bread, you direct where you want your bread to 'open up' and it allows the excess air from bread to escape and it won't burst on the top or where you don't want it to.

This vegan sourdough pancakes recipe is very easy to make and delicious to eat. The best thing is that you can play around with the recipe depending on what you currently have in your kitchen cupboard. I remember when we didn't have a lot of money, we used to make pancakes with just water, baking soda, sugar and flour - a perfect vegan & cheap version of the traditional pancake recipe.

With this recipe, you can use a leftover sourdough starter (unfed sourdough starter) or an active one, if you want. The only difference is going to be the lightness and fluffiness of your pancakes - the more your sourdough starter is active, the more your pancakes rise. But, since this recipe is intended for your leftover sourdough starter (the bit that you normally discard), I always use an unfed sourdough starter with this recipe.