Stacked Puff Pastry with Cherries

Jesse Pope

This turned out great, but with some caveats. First, unless you like it real tart, use dark sweet cherries. They’re canned in syrup and are great. Second, since I was worried it wouldn’t be sweet enough, I wanted to use cake crumbs instead of bread crumbs. Since I try not to just have leftover cake lying around, I bought a blueberry muffin and crumbled it up (looked for one on the clearance shelf, but no luck). I did use an egg wash as the recipe called for, but also sprinkled some sugar on top (again worried it might not be sweet enough). <br />The episode said that you could cook larger puff pastries on a pizza stone. I didn’t do that, but I do keep a pizza stone in the bottom of my oven to help maintain temperature. Well, after 30 minutes at 400°, the top looked burnt. I believe the pizza stone raised the temperature above 400°. I then lowered the temp to 350°, rotated the pan, took out the pizza stone, left the oven door open until the temp dropped and cooked another 30 minutes. When 30 minutes were up, it looked just as burnt as before. <br />So I took it over to my girlfriend’s house and contemplated if we were going to bring it to the Sunday lunch we’d been invited to. We’d just about talked ourselves out of it, when I started scratching the crust, and lo and behold, below that char was a beautiful golden brown layer right underneath. We got out spoons and started to crack away at the damaged goods and all our worries were thrown in the trash. The day was saved! Thank goodness for those thousand layers. I don’t usually write reviews, but hopefully others can benefit from my experience and keep from throwing away a salvageable dessert.