Cherry Pudding (Clafoutis)

It's cherry season again! This Memorial Day Weekend we found plenty of sweet ripe cherries at a u-pick farm in Brentwood. It's painful to waste a cherry by cooking it, but this is the one exception I believe it. The cherries are baked in a simple sweet custard. This is easy, delicious, quick, and very difficult to mess up. Perfect for me!

I tried it with peeled, pitted slices of peach too. Delicious. I substituted the flour for tapioca flour and rice flour. Great! I ran out of milk and substituted an unknown quantity of whipping cream and water. Just fine. I don't own kirsch, so I've never used it, but triple sec worked fine and so did vanilla. I reduced the sugar by half. And that's why this is virtually unbreakable. I'm including the original recipe with my variations in parentheses. This was adapted from Provence the Beautiful Cookbook.

Ingredients:
2 Tablespoons unsalted butter
1 pound stemmed cherries, not pitted (unless you want the extra work)
1/2 cup sugar (my cherries were so ripe I only used 1/4 cup)
4 eggs
small pinch salt
1/2 cup flour (or 1/3 cup tapioca flour, or 1/2 cup rice flour)
1 cup milk
1/4 kirsch (I used 3 Tablespoons of Triple Sec or vanilla)
confectioner's sugar for sprinkling

Directions:
Preheat the oven to 375. Butter a 9 or 10 inch baking dish with a tablespoon of butter. Put the washed cherries in one layer in the bottom of the baking dish. In a separate bowl, beat together the eggs, sugar, salt, flour, milk, and kirsch. Pour the egg mixture over the cherries, and dot the top with a little butter. Put it in the oven and start checking after twenty minutes. (The outside edges will cook first, sometimes puffing up to improbable proportions, but it will fall down again.)  Once the middle looks set but not dry, take it from the oven. Sprinkle with a little confectioners sugar if you like and serve it when it's lukewarm. Any sooner and the cherries will be like molten lava.