Cherries and Cream Pie

In mid-December the topic of baking came up with my girl friends, and we decided to reestablish a weekly baking night in the new year. We parted for the holidays and when I came back I made my new year shopping run - mostly to stock our kitchen, but one of the extras that was on sale that I picked up was cherries.

I told the girls about my find - I thought the would be good for baking, and Allyson (note: this is not the same Alison with whom we originally started baking - she has moved to be near her fiancé) jumped right in and found many recipes that called for cherries. We settled on Cherries and Cream Pie. We did make a few changes to veganize the recipe (non-dairy butter, Tofutti Better than Cream Cheese, Ener-G egg replacer and vanilla soy milk).

We decided the easiest way to pit the cherries was to use halves instead of wholes in the recipe, letting us pull the pit out once we sliced around it.

Slicing these cherries left us red-handed. Literally.

Lila measured and mixed the crust ingredients, Allyson mixed the cream cheese topping and I made the egg then scuttled around the kitchen getting things and putting things away as we were done with them.

We greased a 9.5 inch glass pie pan, and in went the batter. I had fun placing the cherry halves in the yellowy base, and spooning the topping over them.

Batter with cherries...

... and after the topping was added.

 Because of then nature of the pie, a toothpick in the center was not going to ever come out clean, so we had to go by sight, and let the pie bake for 30 minutes.

Finished, and cooling.

The recipe says to serve slightly warm or chilled, but we were anxious to try our creation, and after only half an hour I served up 3 "slices" - the cream topping was like warm pudding, and after serving our portions, I put the pie in the fridge to prevent loss of the rest of the topping into the void made by our missing pieces.

A messy, but delicious, "slice" of the still-warm pie.

The cherry and vanilla flavors went well together, and we were surprised at how fluffy the bottom "crust" came out. All in all a successful evening of baking and as Allyson pointed out, it is amazing how much faster (and how much more fun) baking with friends is over baking alone.

New tools/ ingredients:  vanilla pudding mix
Recipes used: Cherries and Cream Pie from bakingbites.com
Co-bakers: Lila, Allyson
Date: Jan. 5, 2011