Maraschino Cherries – Two Easy-to-Make Recipes – Madison Eats Food Tours
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Maraschino cherries

Maraschino Cherries – Two Easy-to-Make Recipes

If your kids are like mine, they are drawn to bright red foods – hot Cheetos, Twizzlers, Takis, and of course maraschino cherries.

Try as I might, substituting natural cherry fruit leather or beet-colored chips just doesn’t cut it. I know, somewhere along the line I failed. But there’s always a chance for redemption. And maraschino cherries are where I focus my efforts. The ones you buy in the store are laden with chemicals and barely resemble cherries. Of course there is a benefit to making homemade maraschino cherries for us as a parents, too. Maraschino cherries are perfect, necessary even, in cocktails.

The other reason to focus my efforts on cherries is because we happen to have a beautiful Montmorency sour cherry tree in our front yard, and this year, it went nuts. We collected gallons of cherries, delicious and juicy. Some went into jam, I froze a bunch for later, but a few made it into jars of maraschino cherries, both “adult” and “child” friendly versions.

Full disclosure is that my kids taste tested the non-alcoholic ones and said they taste good, “like pie filling”. They are not as sweet as the bright red store bought ones, but then again, these jars contains cherries that taste, well, like cherries. These can be canned for shelf storage, or kept in the fridge, and you can use your frozen sour cherries or the beautiful Bing or Rainier cherries that are abundant now.

Adult-friendly maraschino cherries Recipe.

Child-friendly maraschino cherries Recipe.