Monday 29 December 2014

Cottage in the country; summer cherries

 For the Northern Hemisphere it is winter, snow and freezing temperatures and for many it was a  white Christmas.
 For the Southern Hemisphere it is summer, mid summer and we just had our longest day.
 Today the temperature reached 30 degrees and it was really hot.
 In our small orchard Henk and I found a big cherry tree, because we moved into our cottage in  October, we  don't know what kind of cherries,but the tree had a good crop.
 In the beginning of December Henk and Paul put a bird net over the tree with great difficulty, but it  helped a lot to protect the cherries and not feed our feathery friends.
Bottled cherries with vodka
Of course I had to do something with our cherries and after sharing with my friends and neighbours I still had plenty left over. Bottling was next and I bottled cherries with sugar water and vodka, so for winter Henk and I can enjoy some nice infused cherries over ice cream!
Rachel and Henk picking the cherries

Lots of cherries
But after bottling I still had cherries left over and in the Netherlands, in our province Limburg fruit flans or "vlaaien" as they are called in the local dialect are very popular.
Cherry flan
I decided to bake cherry flans for our dessert, very nice with cream or ice cream.
The recipe is from a old recipe book my mother gave me years ago and it is a recipe for a "kersen vla" but not with the traditional yeast dough.
I share this recipe with you and the dough can be used for different fruit flans as well.

Cherry flan recipe:

250 gram flour
1 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
half cup of milk
30 grams sugar
50 grams butter
1 egg

Mix all the ingredients together and knead into a firm dough.
Roll out with rolling pin, I put some extra flour on the bench to make the dough less sticky.
Place the dough in the flan pan or form, this recipe is enough dough for two flans.
Then I add the cherries on top of the dough and use any jam I have and warm about 4 table spoons of the jam in the microwave and spread the jam over the cherries with the back of a spoon.
I have used plum jam or black currant jam, very nice.
Bake the cherry flan for 20 to 30 minutes in the oven on 180 degrees Celsius.

Enjoy with cream or ice cream! Also these fruit flans freeze well.