One of the very discouraging things about cooking and baking is the grim feeling that a recipe might not turn out when you need it to. Like, oh let's say when your post is due this morning and you got up early to pit cherries - that is the most boring thing to do in the world, by the way. Boring and messy, red juice everywhere. - and you have a deadline and a birthday party to go to this VERY afternoon and so this pie MUST GET BAKED and then you get distracted for two freaking minutes and the crust scorches and there is NO time to make another one.

Hypothetically speaking, of course.

Sigh.

Here's how I went wrong.

I bought some early cherries this weekend, for one. They're not quite in season but I saw them and thought "I WILL MAKE A PIE AND IT WILL BE AWESOME" and brought home a gigantic, expensive bag of sour, tasteless cherries.

Then I pitted them this morning, sleepy after a frequently interrupted night. Thank you, Baby, for being such a shrimpy insomniac.

I found the recipe I wanted to make, this one and it's a very good recipe - I've made it a few times before, but decided to show off this time by making my very tasty tart dough instead of the graham cracker crust. And my tart dough IS good - very good - and very easily made:

You cream 8 tablespoons of butter in a food processor.

And then you add ¼ cup of sugar and cream THAT together.

Easy. After that's creamed nicely, add 1/8 tsp of salt, half a teaspoon of vanilla and 1 cup of flour. Mix that together.

Now take your blob of tart dough and spread it into a pie pan:

Smoosh it all over evenly with your fingers until it's pie-crust shaped, obviously:

Isn't that nice? Prick the dough all over with a fork and CHILL IN THE FREEZER FOR AT LEAST HALF AN HOUR AND UP TO OVERNIGHT. In my hubris - and heck, my hurry, I skipped that part. Don't.

Bake the FROZEN crust for 25 minutes. It should be a lovely golden brown when cooked and not a charred black. Charred black means YOU DID IT WRONG and that you have to stand there carefully cutting the top of the crust off and that your pie will now LOOK FUNNY. Cool your non-horrible crust on a wire rack.

Then I creamed together the cream cheese filling ingredients - that part wasn't hard - and tossed the halved, pitted cherries with some melted strawberry jam and assembled the pie, which looked rather depressingly like this:

Yeah. So it looked all right, and even though it was meant for supper, I decided that it needed to be taste-tested - the things I do for you guys - and took one small piece.

The pie crust was all right - like a flaky shortbread cookie and pretty delicious, even slightly charred.

The cream cheese filling was ambrosial. For someone who is rather cold on cheesecake, I certainly do love cream cheese.

And the cherries were HORRIBLE. Tasteless little red blobs tasting only of strawberry jam, all that effort for not much. As I said earlier, it was discouraging and yet there is nothing nicer in the whole world to eat than a nicely-made fruit tart on an early summer's day and these things HAPPEN. "Dry your eyes upon your apron, brave housewife!" one old cookbook of mine rather patronizingly exhorts, while I will say - mostly to myself - not to cry, for Pete's sake. It's just a dumb pie and the next one will doubtlessly be better.