At Home: Cherries Jubilee

Cherries Jubilee is a dessert dish made with cherries and liqueur (typically Kirschwasser), which is subsequently flambéed, and commonly served as a sauce over vanilla ice cream. According to Wikipedia, "the recipe is generally credited to Auguste Escoffier, who prepared the dish for one of Queen Victoria's Jubilee celebrations, though it is unclear whether it was for the Golden Jubilee of 1887 or the Diamond Jubilee in 1897."  We had some left over cherries and I decided to put my own twist and use an orange flavored liquor instead of cherry liquor or brandy to accent the sweet cherries.  Check out this flaming dessert on What Micky Eats...At Home.

Cherries Jubilee (Serves 2 - 3)

• 2 cups Bing or other dark, sweet cherries - rinsed, de-stemmed, pitted, and halved
• 3 teasp sugar
• 1 teasp cornstarch (optional)
• 2 teasp Grand Marnier or brandy
• 2 - 4 scoops vanilla ice cream
• 10 vanilla wafer cookies, crumbled (optional)

- Add cherries and sugar to a wide sauce pan and heat over medium-high heat.
- Stir until juices release and a sauce forms. (Optional: add cornstarch to thicken sauce, if needed).
- Simmer cherries for 5 minutes.
- While cherries are cooking, scoop ice cream into bowls. (Optional: Add cookie crumbles.)
- Remove cherries from heat.  Add liquor and ignite with a long lighter.  Gently shake pan until flame has extinguished itself.
- Spoon cherries over ice cream.  Enjoy!

Be sure to flambé the cherries
to burn off the alcohol.

If you have a cherry pitter - this dessert will be much easier and quicker to make. Unfortunately, I do not have a nifty little pitter, so I had to cut out each individual pit. Not fun.  Nevertheless, by cutting the cherries, they released their juices quicker and thus I did not have to use any cornstarch to thicken the sauce.  I used Grand Marnier as my liquor mostly because that is what I had around the house, but also because I though the orange would accent the cherries.  However, I forgot to flame it!  Lighting it on fire will burn off most of the alcohol, but since I forgot that step we could still taste the alcohol a bit.  Luckily, I didn't use that much so we weren't that affected - haha.  Keith often likes a bit of crunch texture in his desserts so I added crumbled up vanilla wafer cookies to the ice cream before pouring the cherry sauce over it all.  The cookies helped soak up the drunken syrup and the ice cream melted a little on top from the warm cherries.  The sauce was like dark red syrup and not overly sweet, as some of the cherries were still a tad tart.  This made for a lovely old fashioned dessert.