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Summertime calls for cobblers, add this Cherry Cobbler to your recipe repertoire, and you won’t be sorry. In fact, when I made this to photograph and left it to cool I came home to half of it eaten. It was THAT tempting. Luckily it’s an easy dessert to make so I made it again!
Sweet bing cherries pitted and frozen at the height of the summer season are paired with a crumbly golden brown sweet biscuit topping to make this an almost irresistible homemade cherry cobbler. Top it with a scoop of ice cream and you’re on your way to serving the most perfect dessert of the summer.
CAN YOU BAKE WITH BING CHERRIES?
YES! I know most recipes call for sour cherries for baking. And that’s great. But you can ALSO use bing cherries or sweet cherries. These sweet fresh cherries typically require LESS sugar in recipes because they’re already sweet. You may ALSO want to offset the sweetness of the cherries with a dab of lemon juice. It just gives the fresh cherry flavor some depth. Sweet cherries make a delicious dessert like this cherry dump cake.
They’re also bigger and cook down a little softer than sour cherries. I make bing cherry pie filling all the time. In our house, it’s not Thanksgiving without a bing cherry pie, the perfect holiday dessert.
You can occasionally find pitted sweet(bing) cherries in the freezer section but I like to just buy them fresh when they’re in season. I pit them, freeze them on a baking sheet, and then put them in a food-saver bag and seal them up. You can also use a Ziploc and just remove as much of the air as possible. Tuck a bag of cherries into the deep freezer for a splash of sunshine in the winter months.
To pit cherries, you can either use a paring knife or a cherry pitter. Both work just fine, the cherry pitter will do the job more efficiently, but the knife WILL work.
While you’re pitting cherries be ready for a mess. They’re juicy and have a tendency to splatter when pitting. Have a separate bowl for pits, and pitted cherries. And beware the people who come to eat the pitted cherries, it’s like they know what you’re doing over there!
BISCUITS OR CRUMb TOPPING?
You can make a fresh fruit cobbler with a biscuit topping OR crumbly biscuit topping. This recipe works with either! You can make biscuits and top the hot fruit filling with them. But you can also just crumble the topping mixture over the top of the fruit as well. Both get topped with the extra 2 TBSP of sugar. And the crumb top cobbler bakes up in about the same amount of time as a biscuit-topped cobbler does give or take a couple of minutes.
This Rhubarb Cobbler is topped with biscuits as well as this fresh Strawberry Cobbler. But BOTH of those can be made with the crumble topping!
My quick fake cobblers are dump cakes, like Strawberry Dump Cake and Rhubarb Dump Cake. They’re like a cheater cobbler but easier and quicker. They depend on frozen fruit, jello, a stick of butter, and a yellow cake mix.
- a 2 1/2 quart baking dish OR cast iron skillet
- large bowl
- large saucepan with a lid
- pastry blender or two butter knives
- wooden spoon
- sweet pitted bing cherries, fresh or frozen
- sugar
- cornstarch
- water
- flour
- egg
- buttermilk
- butter, cold butter not melted butter
Whether you use fresh OR frozen cherries you will need the same amount of cherries!
Got Leftovers?
Store leftover cobbler covered at room temperature for up to 48 hours. After that store it in the fridge. Use plastic wrap to cover the cobbler, that way it can breathe a little bit, and maybe your topping won’t get mushy.
Cherry Cobbler
Ingredients
Bing Cherry Filling
- 4 cups pitted bing cherries frozen or fresh
- 1/4 cup water
- 1 1/2 TBSP cornstarch
- 1/3 cup sugar
- 1-2 teaspoons lemon juice to taste
Sweet Biscuit Topping
- 1 cup flour
- 1 tsp baking powder
- 1/4 cup +2 TBSP sugar divided
- 3 TBSP cold butter
- 2 TBSP buttermilk
- 1 egg
Instructions
- preheat the oven to 375°
- put the cherries in a heavy bottom saucepan, mix the water and the cornstarch together
- pour it over the cherries
- add the sugar
- cook over medium heat until the cherry mixture gets thick
- once the mixture is thickened up taste and add 1-2 tsp of lemon juice, cover and keep warm until ready to use
- mix the flour, 1/4 cup sugar, and baking powder together
- cut in the cold butter
- mix the eggs and buttermilk together and quickly stir into the flour mix toss until the dough comes together but keep it light and fluffy
- pour the hot cherry mixture into a 2 1/2 quart baking dish
- use a fork and drop pieces of the dough on top of the cherries
- sprinkle the dough with the remaining sugar
- bake for 20 -25 minutes or until the dough is baked through
- serve hot or cold
