Fresh cherry tartlets

You know, from yesterday’s post that I’m loving the mid-winter sweet cherries I found at the grocery store. I wanted to throw something together for an after-school snack, and I knew I had a sheet of puff pasty in the freezer, so fresh cherry tartlets with cream cheese and lemon glaze came to mind.

Here’s what you’ll need:

1 sheet of puff-pastry

10 sweet, fresh cherries

1 1/2 tablespoons sugar

1 tablespoon salted butter

the juice of 1/2 lemon

1/2  teaspoon real vanilla extract

cream cheese

turbinado sugar ~ optional

I used a small bowl and cut circles out of puff-pastry. The pastry is about four inches across.

Using a fork, I docked the pastry to keep it from puffing up too much in the center.

Cut 10 fresh cherries in half and remove the stones.

In a small saucepan add the sugar, butter, lemon juice and vanilla. Cook over medium heat stirring until the sugar melts.

Then add the fresh fruit. Cook the cherries for about 5 minutes and remove with a slotted spoon and set aside.

Continue reducing the cherry glaze until its nice and thick.

Run the pastry rounds into a preheated oven at 400′ for 7 minutes. Once their 7 minutes is up, add 5 cherry halves to each round.

Next, add a dollop of cream cheese between each cherry and sprinkle with turbinado sugar.

Run back into the 400′ oven for about 11 minutes, or until nice a brown.

Arrange the tartlets on a tray, and drizzle the cherry~lemon glaze over them.

A side note, while you were waiting for the tarts to bake, your glaze may have cooled and hardened a bit, just re-heat on the stove-top to get it back to a drizzling stage. Also, I used a pastry brush to drizzle the glaze.

Enjoy!

the wanna be country girl – Caroline