2020 is just being difficult. This entire year has just seemed to not want to cooperate. I don’t have time to make a list. I’m sure you can think of many things that have changed for some way in 2020. Now, green maraschino cherries seem to have become scarce.
Not that they weren’t scarce to begin with. Let’s be honest, green is not a natural colour for cherries. They don’t come that way. They have to be made that way. Someone has to take perfectly good cherries and bleach them and dye them to make them another colour. I think they probably do that with the red maraschino cherries, too, because that particular shade of red is not a real cherry colour.
And if you Google maraschino cherries, you will find many people telling you not to eat them because of this unnaturalness, but I don’t care about that. It’s Christmas. There’s baking to be done. And around my place, that requires both red and green maraschino cherries.
Some of these cherries will be cut into small pieces and used to decorate shortbreads. Others get stuffed inside little balls of chocolatey sort of stuff. It’s been done for years in our family, and it must continue. But the cherries do not wish to cooperate. There are plenty of red ones, just green seem hard to find.
This isn’t a huge surprise. If you use them in your baking, you may have noticed that while the red maraschino cherries come in fairly substantial sized bottles, other colours do not. They only come in small bottles. Like they are somehow a rare find.
Oh, you can find the glazed cherries in many colours. That’s no problem. But glazed will not do. They must be proper maraschinos.
As I mentioned, one of the uses for these cherries is to put them inside of little balls of chocolate. The cherry is not able to be seen from the outside, so one of our games it this time of year is to guess the colour of the cherry inside the ball. Is it red? Or is it green?
Unless my hunt for the elusive green cherries suddenly takes a turn for the better, the game just got a whole lot easier for this year. Red. The answer is red.
And yes, we do have shortbread with red and green sprinkles. I can find those.
