Chock full of cherries

Over the last few weeks my local market and grocer have been drowned in all sorts of cherries, which to me means it's time gorge. 

Every evening I've been delighting in a bowl full of cherries. This season has been particularly lovely. I've not had one bad cherry, which it something of a joy.

Aside from eating my way through pallets of cherries I thought I'd see how else I could incorporate it into some baking, and thus I hit on cherry muffins. 

Not having my own stock recipe for muffins I hit Google and found The Hairy Bikers recipe for Lemon and Blueberry muffins.

Baking with cherries also gave me a great excuse to buy a cherry and olive pitter. I'm ever so slowly building up a stock of cooking equipment. If anyone fancies buying me a set of Japanese knives I'll not refuse. 

The pitter is a fun tool to use. The one I bought, OXO  Good Grips, comes with a splatter guard which should save you any gore. I did find that you had to give some of the cherries a few goes before the stones decided to pop out. Otherwise it was quick and clean. The aftermath did remind of CSI; I'm not sure a fruit spin-off would be all too popular though.

For my purposes I left out the blueberries and lemon curd, but of course you can go ahead and give their muffins a shot. I just happened to want to do cherries. 

Leaving the above aside I pretty much followed the recipe to the letter along with the addition of 250g of cherries; that weight is for whole cherries, stones and stalks and all. The amount seemed just right as each muffin had an equal share of cherries. 

You actually don't need a lot to put the muffins together. You might have noticed the lack of eggs in my set-up. I actually am an eggless cook and indeed a vegetarian. In this case I used an egg replaced which did the job.

While the muffins turned out great I would have added a some more sugar. It just wasn't sweet enough for me.

Everyone else enjoyed the muffins but I would eat them on the day, or at the very least finish them off the next day. The cherries don't like to sit around.

Give it a go and let me know what you think.