Cherry Cordials!

    Hello! This is another installment in the baking posts! I am trying to make one of these posts every one or two weeks because I want to bake more and I want to have more variety in what kind of content that I am posting about. I really like making these posts because it means that I get to bake things and I get to learn more baking skills.

     This past week, I made cherry cordials. Cherry cordials are a kind of cherry candy that starts with marashino cherries being soaked in alcohol overnight, covered in fondant, dipped in chocolate, and then left to sit for two days. They have to sit for this long once they are done is because the alcohol in the cherries turns the fondant into a syrup. 

    When I first started making these, I did not think that they would come out exactly right or that the fondant would liquefy like it was supposed to, but I was very wrong. Making these for the first time was a lot more difficult than I thought it would be when I first started making them.

     I did not research these a whole lot before I was making them, so I was not fully prepared for all of the extremely lengthly steps involved. Some recipes, aka not the recipe I used, take longer, and some recipes take shorter. The average length of time for the whole process is usually about three days, however.

     In the beginning, I thought this would only take a day, so I started them with the thought that they would be done before last Sunday in time for this blog post to be posted. However, that clearly did not happen because I underestimated how long this whole recipe would take.

     The reason I wanted to make these is a little bit of a story. Several years ago, one of my mother’s best friends was staying at our house for a couple days and she is a really good cook. She mentioned, in passing, that she had some cherry cordials at home that she made that were in the process of sitting.

     Ever since she mentioned this when I was very young, I have had cherry cordials in the back of my mind. When I started this baking series, I did not think of it at first, but I did think of it after a while and got really excited. I have clearly wanted to make these for years, but I finally had the experitise and the maturity to make them.

     I’m glad that I did not make these any sooner in my life, because they were really hard and I needed the patience that I have acquired over this time to even get through making them. However, I think that now I know the process of how to make them, it will definitely be a lot easier the second time.

     Now, I am going to tell you guys about the lengthly process of making these. There were a few mishaps, a lot of retrying, and a lot of frustration that went into making these. I like how they turned out, and they tasted alright. I was nervous trying them, because I tried them after I soaked them in alcohol, and they were absolutely terrible.

     The first thing I did was research the kind of alcohol that was best to soak the cherries in. I read one article that listed a bunch of kinds of alcohol and ranked all of them when they soaked cherries in it. I found out that they thought rum and gin made the cherries taste the best, so I looked for those two.     However, we did not have any gin, or regular rum, so I ended up using coconut rum and watermelon vodka, both of which smell very good, but taste terrible. To me, at least. I put half of the cherries I was using into one jar labeled coconut rum, and the other half in a jar labeled watermelon vodka. 

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    I poured in alcohol to cover all of the cherries, which is a point I might have messed up on in hindsight, since the recipe only calls for a few tablespoons of the alcohol to soak the cherries in. I put the lids on them and left them to soak, outside of the fridge, overnight.

     After this step was completed, I started the next step of making the fondant. I made one batch of fondant, but that turned out to be a hard slab of hard candy and not soft fondant at all, so I had to make another batch. The second batch I made was a lot better, since I was a lot more careful about what temperature it got to.

     I put the fondant on a baking sheet covered in parchment paper to start to fold it to make it turn into more of a fondant and not a slime. This was one of the most difficult parts of the whole process, besides all of the waiting, because it wouldn’t do what I wanted it to do at first, but it eventually worked.

     I do not think that my fondant turned out very good, but I think I can make it a lot better next time, if there is a next time. After I did this, I realized I had doubled the recipe in the first place, and that I did not double the fondant. So, I went through the whole fondant process again, but it was easier since I now had technique.

     All of this frustration that I had encountered during this step had to do with not researching enough, and not giving myself enough time to do things. I also did not pay enough attention at this point in time, and that definitely did not help my case.     The next step after this took me much longer than it should have. The day I was supposed to dip all of the cherries in fondant, I had to make dinner at my gramma’s house for my mom’s birthday. This took up most of the day and I only ended up making eight cherry cordials in full for my gramma to have so I did not have to make another trip just to bring them to her.

     This step was also frustrating because I did not know how hot the fondant should be, I did not let the fondant dry enough, and the chocolate did not have enough time to harden before I brought them to her house. I did end up fixing all of these things when I finally got around to making the rest of them. 

    It took me a few days to finally get around to making the rest of them. I had a friend help me when I did, and it went a lot smoother than the first time. I heated up the fondant a little more, which made it much easier to dip the cherries into, and I chilled them for much longer so the fondant had more time to dry and did not come off of the cherries.

     These turned out a lot nicer than the first ones, and they were a lot nicer to make. I put these in the fridge, gave my friend some, and waited over 48 hours for them to be done. I tried them just this morning with my parents and my boyfriend, and we thought they turned out pretty good!

They do not really taste like any alcohol at all, and all of the taste together are very nice. I was nervous to try them because I tried a cherry after I had soaked it in alcohol, and I had to spit it out. They actually turned out super nice, and I’m really glad that I ended up liking them.

    I think that there is a possibility that I will make these in the future since they actually turned out to taste good and they will be easier to make the second time around. I really love how they turned out, and I think they worked pretty well, unlike what I thought would happen. 

    Next time I make one of these posts, it will be tiny sandwich cookies made with vanilla or chocolate covered orange jelly sticks, which I just thought about making yesterday. I think both of these things will be fun to make, and I am excited to tell you all about it when I do! 

    Thank you all so much for reading my blog post and supporting my journey! It really means a lot to me. 

    P.S. If you would like a custom ashtray, the general pricing for just color and glitter in my medium to small molds would be $12 locally in Vegas, and $4.25 extra if I am shipping it to you. This would be $3 extra if I am using a larger mold, since it takes more resin to make. The general pricing for color, glitter, and flowers or a picture or whatever else you want me to put in it would be $15 locally in Vegas, and $4.25 if I am shipping it to you. If you would like me to add a magnet in the bottom or the sides, that would be $5 extra. If you wanted something that had more stuff than this, the pricing varies.