23/52: The Great Cherry Bakeoff

It's cherry season!

I'll confess, I don't really like cherries... I tried baking with the ones from our tree a few years ago to see if maybe I liked *our* cherries but no, they still taste like cough syrup. We had a really good harvest from our sour cherry tree this year, thanks to no late frosts. The kids were ecstatic! They'll happily eat them raw, perching themselves up in the tree like little monkeys, and I told them I wasn't going to bake with them and figured that was that.

However.

Evidently they remembered that they're old enough to bake on their own now! They carefully followed recipes and made their own desserts in teams - double crust cherry pie for the boys, cherry tart for Cecilia, cherry compote for the twins. They didn't make too terrible a mess, and they certainly enjoyed the taste testing!

There were mishaps, of course... The boys started their pie filling and then forgot it was on the stove; I came downstairs after getting the baby down for a nap to the smell of burning, and half the pie filling burned to the bottom of the pan. But they really did roll out that crust impressively, and I didn't have to help at all! All those play doh skills finally put to good use, it seems.

In the end, everybody though their own dessert was the best dessert. Everything tastes better when you make it yourself, after all!