Cherry Danish

I love danish pasties. I've only ever had the stale kind that were mass produced in a factory but I'm pretty sure once I get my hands on the fresh stuff it will be a revelation. I made this from the blog Budget Bytes- which you can tell the blogs specialty is more food than dessert focused. But I figured I would try it out anyway. 

I made my own puff pastry. I was kind of tempted to try danish dough but it had been awhile since I did puff pastry and I wanted to make sure I still had it. I used my favorite puff recipe from Food Network. Of course you can buy it. But most of the stuff you get in the store doesn't even have butter. Which is a crime in my eyes. You can't have puff pastry without butter.

Anyway, so I made the puff pastry from scratch.

And the cherry filling. I don't like canned fruit fillings. They are nasty and they contain a bunch of strange ingredients. Fresh cherries aren't really in season so I just used frozen. I can't remember what blog I got the recipe from but it was just the cherries, arrow root powder, sugar, water, a splash of lemon juice, and almond extract.

Next I mixed up my cream cheese. Which I don't think it tastes like the cream cheese filling I'm used to. But it was ok. I think other cheese filling has more ingredients-like egg.

Then I assembled. Not like the blog, because they just looked like cherry turnovers. So I googled and saw a pastry that looked kinda pretty to me. And so I did that. I just cut the puff into squares, put a dollop of cream cheese mixture, the cherries, and then added the almonds.

Baked them up.

Sprinkled them with powdered sugar and they were good to go.

They were good, especially when given some time to cool. The cherry flavor comes out more when it's cooler as opposed to warm. They didn't taste like a cherry danish though. 

If I made them again I would do blueberry. Or strawberry. Since I like those cooked a lot more than cherries. But the cherry wasn't bad. It didn't taste at all like medicine which was good!

You can check out the original recipe here!