Recipe improvisation

In a previous blog I mentioned picking my cherries off the Carmine Jewell Dwarf Cherry tree, hoping for some fresh eating cherries.  But I found them slightly more tart than I expected, and so baked some of them into a fast fruit cobbler. Of course, I had to pit them, which took some time.

Friday I finally finished pitting the remainder of them, and baked them into a peach skillet pie — which I turned into a cherry skillet pie.

The Recipe goes like thus:

2 cups flour

1 teaspoon salt

4 teaspoons baking powder

6 tablespoons shortening

Milk

Rich Biscuit Dough: sift together flour, salt and baking powder. Cut in shortening with pastry blender. Stir in 1/2 to 2/3 cup milk (just enough to make a soft dough). Knead very lightly just to smooth up. Roll out 1/8 inch thick. Put into a heavy skillet letting dough hang over edge.

Peaches

3/4 cups sugar

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

2 tablespoons butter

Fill skillet with 6 to 8 sliced fresh peaches. Sprinkle with mixture of sugar, salt and cinnamon. Dot with butter. Fold extra dough toward center, leaving center uncovered. Bake 25 to 30 minutes using a hot oven (450 degrees) for first 10 minutes then turn to 375 degrees.

So I started making this recipe, only I mixed the dough, added the milk, and kneaded the dough before realizing that I hadn’t cut in the shortening.  So I took the dry dough and cut in the shortening after it was kneaded and rekneaded it. Which is probably why it didn’t work up to roll out as far as I expected, but far enough to cover the bottom and a modest amount of top coverage.

Now the call for a heavy skillet means iron frying pan to my mother and sister, who gave me the recipe. But since we don’t own any I put it into a deep pan and followed through with the rest of the recipe, using the cherry substitution.

It baked just fine, and tasted good.  So it looks like you can substitute cherries for peaches, and you can cut shortening into dough after you have kneaded it.