Whoever said you can’t make a good cherry pie with sweet cherries was lying. Sure, I love a sour or tart cherry pie as much as the next cherry-lover, but when the Greenmarket only has the sweet ones, there’s no reason to run in the other direction.

It helps that they were early-season cherries, thus not as sweet as the dark purple Bings we’re getting in the supermarkets right now. But I maintain that even if their sugars were fully developed, you could have just dialed back the sugar and punched up the acidity some more to balance it out.

There’s just no excuse not to make cherry pie when they’re this pretty.

You might want to wear dark clothes when you pit the cherries.

Even with OXO’s smarty-pants splash guard (yes, I finally bought one), I was finding garnet splatters from the food processor to the wall hours later. (I thought it was pretty and amusingly macabre, but Fear of Ants got me to wipe it up anyway.)

A good part of my Pie Superstition comes from the fact that pie dough, it just doesn’t like heat and humidity. It’s best to know this going into it, rechill it if it gets sticky, and try not to bemoan the tears and patching that inevitably occur, at least in our kitchen.

Because seriously, does this just not make you want to get outside? Do you see that sunlight ricocheting off the cherries?

Sadly, the lid, with it’s off-centered and ill-conceived star cut out didn’t do those cherries justice, but I didn’t hear anyone complain.

It was still, indeed, a star.

And it didn’t last long.

We considered arm-wrestling for the last piece.

The pie didn’t win.

One year ago: Lemon Risotto