Baking with Suesa (Cherry Pastries)

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_{By congerdesign on pixabay.com}

I love cooking and I'm good at it. I like baking and I'm ... well ... let's say sometimes I am somewhat successful in what I am doing. It's not that I'm bad at following the recipe, the recipe just somehow turns out shitty for me!

So, today, I wanted to make a nice snack to bring for a picnic a friend and I will have, and I decided to bake something. But no recipe I found made me happy, so I decided to experiment a little bit. Armed with a recipe for a simple sweet yeast dough, I started...

Mix:

275 g white flour (the one with absolutely no nutritional value aside from calories. Yum!)
65 g white sugar (we don't want to ruin the effort to be unhealthy)
1 egg (Oh, the cholesterol!)
65 g butter (I melt it in the microwave for 30 seconds so it's liquid and mixes better. Don't keep it in for too long or it will explode and ruin your microwave. Not that this has ever happened to me. No ...)
150 ml milk (they did what to a cow?)
pinch of salt (been in a mountain for millions of years but expires next year in December)
Yeast, dry or fresh (It's alive! Take that, vegans!)

Knead it well, complain that it's sticking to your fingers, and call someone to add some flour until it's possible to remove from your fingers. Don't try to use a egg whisk, because that will only end in sadness.

Now it's time to form the dough into a ball, put it back into the bowl, cover it with a (optionally clean) cloth, put it in a warm place (for example the kitchen you've been working in, which has reached 30°C now as the sun is shining directly through the window), and wait for 2 hours.

Let the yeast multiply.

Let it multiply really well.

Your dough ball should now be big, fluffy and holy. Not the religious kind, although Jesus was kind of holy in more than one way at the end of his life ...

... I am so going to regret making this joke.

After admiring your wonderful baby, we focus our attention on the cherries in a glas. Drain the water completely, then put them in a pot and add some sugar. Crank the heat up and let them sit for a while, stirring now and then, to get rid of as much fluid as possible. Drain them again.

While you boil the hell out of your cherries ~~so they become holy too~~, you can start forming litte, somewhat round dough pieces. Don't make them too thin. How big should they be? Well, I used the size of my palm. It depends on how much you want to put inside.

Cut up some tiny chocolate pieces (I used Kinderschokolade because I CAN) and put them in the middle of your dough "circles". Take one in your hand and add your ~~holy~~ drained cherries. Here's where the size comes to play! I added 3 cherries per circle.

Close the ends and form a ball, then place it on a baking sheet.

IMPORTANT: Place your little bundle of joy with the side you closed DOWN, as it might slightly open up during baking. If it's up, you'll have ruined everything and will be sad. Don't do that.

Preheat the oven to 180 °C (Don't skip this step. I did once and got soggy cake) and bake for about 10 minutes. Check in on your pastries from time to time to make sure they don't burn up. They should start to become a bit brown after a while, but not completely dark.

Take out when you think they're ready, you can always place them back in (in contrary to babies).