My cousin generously offered to let me come over and pick sour cherries from her trees this year, but I just ran out of time. The season is just so limited and with this past weekend being the holiday and being away this weekend, when I saw them for sale at my local farm stand, I made the decision to buy instead of pick. Now that I know she has cherries trees, I will be working that into my schedule for next year, you can rest assured!
I swear cherries are the most time-consuming of all of the fruit I can. You need to de-stem them, clean them, then pit them and crush them before you can start making your first batch of jam. The prep time involved is more extensive than anything else I can with the exception of cucumber relish. The good news is that once the fruit is prepped, the actual process of making jam is rather quick.
I was able to use two of the quarts in the bachelor’s jam I have started, the rest I used to make three batches of cherry jam and one batch of chocolate cherry jam. The chocolate cherry jam is a new recipe that I found online. It isn’t setting up as nicely as I would like, but I know from previous experience that adding chocolate to fruit can sometimes increase the time it takes to set as much as two weeks from the date of canning. I will keep you posted on how it turns out. Either way, it will be fine, right now it is thick enough to be used as an ice cream topping or as a topping for pound cake and goodness knows, chocolate and cherry are a potent combination on top of vanilla ice cream.
Pickled Sweet 