cherry pie

Cherry pie to make Dale Cooper blush. On my recent trip down a portion of the Great Ocean Road we stopped at a servo hawking $10 boxes of mangoes, cherries and other deliciousness and picked up some goodies. No prizes for guessing what I got. These cherries were unreal, so fresh, plump and firm, they didn't really need *anything* to make it into this pie. I kept it plain with a tiny bit of sugar and it was out of this world. That's damn fine cherry pie.

ingredients
1 kg of pitted, halved cherries
1/8 cup of sweetner (liquid or dry is fine)
2 x frozen pastry sheets, defrosted (short crust is best)

method
1. Preheat the oven to 180 degrees.

2. Line a 9 inch pie pan with a sheet of pastry. Mine doesn't make it all the way around so either use a smaller pie pan, roll out the pastry a little thinner or do what I do which is pinch a few strips from the other sheet and make up the difference. Prick the base of the pie about 10 times with a fork. At this point you can "blind bake" your crust, I didn't (I didn't have any baking paper) and it turned out ok for me.

3. Toss the pitted cherries in the sweetner and spread over the pie base. Make the lattice top, sprinkle with some sugar and bake for about 30 minutes or until golden brown. Serve with a traditional scoop of vanilla ice cream.