With a cherry on top

Fiona and I have been intending to bake something together for aaaaaages, and we finally got around to it! I had a couple of jars of morello cherries from Lidl in my cupboard, so we decided to do a cherry tart. Nothing terribly outlandish or high effort, but it was still fun and tasty. I only had my tablet to take photos with though, so apologies for the poor quality photos.

Simple Cherry Tart
Ingredients
For the filling

• One jar of morello cherries in syrup (350g drained weight)
• 3tbsp Caster sugar
• Approx 1/4 of a nutmeg*
• A generous shake of ground cinnamon*
• 2tbsp Plain flour

For the shortcrust pastry

• 200g Plain flour
• 100g Butter
• 50g Sugar
• Few tablespoons of the syrup from the jar of cherries*

Method

1. Drain the cherries, keeping the syrup, and put in a saucepan.
2. Mash the cherries, add the rest of the ingredients for the filling and simmer.
3. Rub the butter into the flour and sugar for the pastry until it resembles breadcrumbs.
4. Add a little syrup from the cherry jar to turn it into a dough.
5. Roll out two-thirds of the pastry and line two greased pie dishes.
6. Weigh down and blind bake for ~15 minutes at ~200C.
7. Pour filling into pie dishes and decorate with remaining pastry.
8. Bake for ~15 minutes at ~200C.

*As you can see, we might have been winging it slightly with the recipe...

Here's my glamorous assistant (who is actually the one doing all the work).

And here she is, still doing the work.

The finished articles!

So how was it? Well, really rather good. The filling was a bit thin (as was the pastry), but this actually worked quite nicely - the filling would have been a bit too sharp otherwise, but it was quite nicely balanced with the sweeter pastry as it was. We slightly overbaked the pie crusts when blind baking it, which meant the lattice had to be a little under done to stop the crust from burning, but it was generally really rather tasty. Nothing overly special, but nice to see that even really low effort pies can still taste so good!