Cherry Clafoutis

...or something like that.

Cherries were 98¢ per pound this week so I bought several pounds.  Jeffrey loves eating them, and I figured for that price I could also try out a cherry dessert I'd seen on Facebook a while back.  Of course, I couldn't find the exact recipe I was thinking of, so I turned to Pinterest.  This is what I found.

Cherry Clafoutis
from Kitchme

Ingredients:

• 1/4 cup butter, melted
• 1/2 cup almonds, toasted
• 1 lb. fresh cherries, pitted and cut in half
• 1/2 cup white flour
• 1/2 cup sugar
• pinch of salt
• 4 eggs
• 1 cup milk
• 1 tsp vanilla
• zest of one lemon
• powdered sugar 

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 325°.  Generously butter and flour a square baking dish.
2. Spread cherries evenly in the bottom of prepared baking dish.
3. In food processor, pulse almonds, flour, sugar, and salt until almonds are coarsely chopped.
4. In large bowl, whisk eggs, milk, vanilla, and lemon zest.  Add in the melted butter and flour mixture and mix well.  Pour over cherries.
5. Bake in preheated oven 40-60 minutes, or until center is set and the top is golden brown.
6. Dust with powdered sugar and serve with whipped cream.

I am definitely going to have to make this again.  We really liked it.  BUT, it didn't turn out exactly the way I was expecting.  It turned out very custardy and not at all cake-like, which I was expecting from the picture.  Of course, another recipe I found looked entirely custardy - and somehow the cherries all ended up on top of the custard.  How did they do that?  I do want to try dusting the buttered baking dish with granulated sugar as suggested in that recipe, instead of flour.  Like I said, I am going to have to make this again.

Mine took quite a bit longer to bake than the original recipe, and it seemed like there was just too much butter.  Some people may think there is no such thing, but... Looking back over the recipe now, I see that I did have too much butter.  The recipe called for 1/2 a stick of butter, and I read that as 1/2 cup - so I used a whole stick.  That's twice as much butter as I was supposed to use!  So, Next time I'll do it right and see how that works out.

Other than that, the only difference in my recipe was that I used whole almonds instead of sliced ones because that was what I had, and I figured they were going to get chopped up anyway.  Oh, the smell of toasted almonds!  I would suggest toasting your almonds before starting on pitting your cherries, otherwise it can be quite a mess.  Those cherries themselves can be quite a mess.  I wore plastic gloves to avoid staining my hands with the cherry juice - but trying to slip one glove off to go check and shake the almonds while they toasted was quite a feat, and I ended up splattering some cherry juice on my face and in my hair trying to get the glove back on - without getting cherry juice inside one of the gloves.  But, my hands did stay fairly clean, except for the thumb I was using to pop the pits out.  Of course my thumbnail would pop a hole in the glove!

Also, what size baking dish is 7x5"?  Yes, I know - 7 inches by 5 inches, but what kind of dish would that be?  I didn't know so just went with my square cake pan.  It looks like it fit just about perfectly.

The flavor of this was really good, even if I did mess it up a bit.  I'm already thinking of other fruit I could use.  Maybe peaches?  The peaches in the store have been really good this year.  Anybody else notice that?  Sometimes they're just really disappointing; either they don't ripen up, or they get all mealy and yucky.  But this year they're nice and sweet.  Anyway, back to the dessert - clafoutis - I'm not even sure how to pronounce it or why it's called that, but we are enjoying it, so that's all that matters.  Have you made one or have a recipe I should use?  Please share!