Cherry Crunch Dessert Recipe

Hi! I’m Betty. Welcome to Betty’s Kitchen. Today, we are going to do a dessert. And it’s one of my favorite desserts. I brought it into my family over 30 years ago and all of us still enjoyed it. It’s called cherry crunch and it’s very quick and simple to do. You will need one can and this is 20-ounce can of cherry pie filling. I have not chosen to use the no sugar added and I think that works well on this recipe because you’ll see in a minute we’re going to be adding something very sweet and the contrast between the sweet and the sour really gets a little tang, a little bite. It is very good.

You’ll need one stick of margarine. It’s any brand you want to use. You will need one white cake mix. I’ve already got this open and ready to go. It can be yellow if you would like to use yellow cake mix, made with butter cake mix. You will need one cup of pecan pieces right at we have that measure out and we get ready for that. So the first thing I’m going to do is take a deep dish pot plate and put the cherries in that.

So we have our can of cherries and I’m just going to scoop this into the pot plate. It’s very quick and easy to do and just when those are in there. Spread the mound or you might just shake the plate a little bit and those will work themselves until very evenly spaced. So we’re done on that part. Next part is to take your complete cake mix and put it into a large mixing bowl and then the one stick of margarine you are going to need all of that.

So we’ll just flip that in here and we need to mix this together. You do not want to melt the margarine because everything will just clump. This is to be a topping for our cherries and we need it to be nice and granular. The way to get that is with the pastry blender. So I’ll cut that with me. If you don’t have one, you can just use a fork. It will come out fine. This makes it a little better and also a heavy margarine at room temperature, so that it measures up very easily and readily.

If you choose to use margarine that is straight from the refrigerator, actually it turns out a little nicer but what we’re using this time is margarine that is at room temperature. You can see, I’m just kind of pressing against this and rotating the bowl, trying to get this all mixed together and occasionally I might need to take a fork. Scoop this margarine off of the pastry blender and begin again.

So we’re almost there but not look like it but when we get finish we’ll know that because it will look kind of corn meal. It will be just very grainy and it will not be sitting together in clumps. There will not be individual pieces of margarine that you can see. It will just be a nice crumb crust. So keep on doing that for a little bit longer and then I’ll tell my next steps, so you can be prepared.

You will have your pecan pieces and you could use some other nut if you like something, like almonds better but I like pecans for this particular recipe but you are going to take your one cup of pecan pieces and mix that in with your pastry blend and the pasty blend actually is just a white cake mix and one stick of margarine.

You could use butter if you like to do that. So I think I’m all done there. So let’s set this aside and then I’m going to add the pecans. We’re going to stir those together and you want to get a nice blend here for the pecans are fairly equally space throughout. If it doesn’t happen while you're doing this stirring, then you can adjust as you do the pouring over the top of the cherry pie filling.

So I think we’re about ready to put this on top of the cherry pie filling and I will tell you before I did this pouring that we are going to put this in to an oven that has been heated to 350 degrees and we are going to be letting it cooked for probably 20 minutes. You need to look it on occasionally and just see that it’s browning properly. When it’s to the degree of brownness you want and you see the cherry pie bubbling up, you know it’s done. So let’s pour this in and you can see I just kind of pour it in one big, half a portion and then I’m going to spread it out so it will be equal or even.

If I noticed that I need a few more pecans in one area, I’ll just going to shift and all that. The important thing here is that this is crumbly. You do not want it to be clumpy at all. If it is then you’ll have a nice dish but it will not be cherry crunch. It will be a cherry with crust which is okay but if you want cherry crunch then you want all of these to be porous so that the area gets through and it browns nicely and give you that crunchiness when you eat it.

So I’m going to move this to the oven which as I said it’s preheated to 350 degrees and then we’ll let it cook for 20 minutes, maybe check the pan, maybe leave it a little longer but it probably will be done at that point. I have one that I have made this morning and actually I just got it out of the oven a few minutes ago, so it’s still very hot. I’m going to put some of that out on a plate so you can see what it looks like.

So I just dip in here at the edge. You can see that the cherry pie filling has bubbled up. Dig it at the edge and I will get of topping and cherry pie filling. You’ll want to give a nice, just portion and when you have it at this point, you can go ahead and serve it or you can eat it. Some toppings that would work for you would be something like ready clip. You can just quickly squeeze them on the top or you could have scoop of vanilla ice cream. This is our finished product and it’s ready to eat. I think I’ll take a bite and see if it’s good. It’s very good! See you next time.