Last weekend we had a poolside cookout with some friends, and the party included two little girls between the ages of 3 and 5. We brought a bowl of enormous black cherries and the girls couldn't eat enough - they were grabbing handfuls and spitting out the pits under their mother's watchful eye. At the end of the afternoon they had pink juice stains streaked past their elbows and down their chins - pink even after a good scrubbing in the pool.
And that's really all we want from our summer cherries - handfuls to eat, with a taste better than any manufactured bonbon. What do you do with summer cherries? Do you prefer the giant black sweet ones, or the bright sour or Rainier cherries?
When we get tired of eating fresh cherries, or when they start getting too soft, we think about recipes like these Drunken Cherries at 101 Cookbooks (GREAT with ice cream), or the Cherry and Chocolate Cakes in this article.
More on Cherries
• Sweet Pascha Cheese with Cherries
• Cherry Pitter Review
• Canning Jumbo Cherries
• Cherry Cream Cheese Brownies
• Health Benefits of Cherries, Chocolate and Milk
(Image credit: Sydney Morning Herald)
Soda Recipe: Homemade Ginger Ale
Recipe: Spring Fruit and Nut Tabouli
Good Food to Share 
The Big Book of Small, Cool Spaces 
Apartment Therapy Presents 
The Eight-Step Home Cure 
TW Salt Mill by Wil...
The Ultimate Used Furniture Cleaning Kit
Ana Creates a Community at Home
Since I was the one who asked how to modify the cherry cream cheese brownie recipe to make them more dense and fudgy, I thought I'd report on the outcome. I used the Taunton chewy brownie recipe as Faith suggested, but added a little more flour to the batter to make up for the addition of the Kirsch. I added an egg to the cream cheese mixture as also suggested to ensure it held together in the moister brownie. Adding the egg increased the volume of the mixture more than I expected and my six even spoonfuls swirled *into* the brownies ended up being a cream cheese blanket *over* the brownies! Also, I recently moved and am fighting with an electric stove/oven (I am used to gas). Not sure that the temp settings are all that accurate and so suggested baking times have not yieded properly cooked food. The Tauton recipe makes a really, really thick brownie, and I found that the cream cheese topping was cooking much faster than the brownies. I eventually adjusted the rack to move the top a little farther from the heat source and covered it with foil. The cream cheese turned out a little more browned than I would have liked, but it didn't burn and still tastes good. The brownies are sinfully rich, and I have been elevated to demi-god status at the boy's work after sending him in today with a plate full of them. Had to get as many out of the house as possible or we'd be having them for all three meals (oh will power, where are you?!)
We went cherry picking a couple of weeks ago and solicited recipies from everyone we knew.
The tastiest one was a black forrest cherry cake:
3 eggs
1½ cup sugar
¾ cup oil
3 tbs cocoa
¾ cup flour
¾ cup ground almonds or hazelnuts
1 can drained sour cherries
Mix ingredients then fold in cherries
Bake 40 min at 375 deg
However, the one that was the most fun to make was the cherry ices, pictured here:
http://lanseybrothers.blogspot.com/2007/07/cherry-gore.html