I’ve made a lot of ice cream and this one is one of the most memorable and delicious. It’s flavor is very much close to Amaretto but much better. Cherry pits are what is supposedly used to make almond extract and is used to flavor marzipan. It’s nutty and has a complex bitter edge that I love. Cherry pits are supposedly toxic and could be harmful if consumed in huge quantities. There are a few discussions on the subject at eggbeater’s blog where I got the recipe . Toxic or not, cherry pits make a wonderful frozen treat that is highly addictive. It’s not just the taste, but even the texture of the ice cream is very nice, smooth and a touch elastic. To make the ice cream I collected cherry pits in the freezer for a good while until I had enough. Turns out I needed about 15 pounds of cherries to get 1.5 cups of pits!
To serve it, other than eating it on it’s own, it makes sense to serve it with stone fruit like cherries of course. I made a batch of David Lebovitz’s Cherries in Red Wine Syrup and used them with plenty of their flavorful syrup and almonds as a topping for the Noyaux (pronounced Nwhy-O).
Another seasonal fruit, peach, goes in the other dessert. This one is a simple peach crisp. The streusel topping is loaded with almonds to make it even more cherry pit friendly. I used a few of the wine poached cherries to garnish the dessert.
