Glazed Cherry Pie Bars

Week 485, and the tomatoes ripening, the corn arriving, the garden in full production, the heat in the kitchen. I am 68 years old and the days have a rhythm now — the morning writing, the afternoon visits to Cedarhurst, the evening cooking, the weekly blog post — and the rhythm is the structure, and the structure is the sanity, and the sanity is required because the rest of it, the losing and the loving and the carrying, requires a sane woman at the helm, and I am sane, mostly, except when I cry in the car in the Cedarhurst parking lot, which is not insanity but its opposite: the specific, targeted release of emotion in a contained space, which is the most rational thing I do all week.

Rosh Hashanah; Sophie matzo balls; Ethan four questions; holiday plate to Marvin. These are the facts of the week, the data points, the things I would put in a report if I were writing a report, which I am not — I am writing a life, and the life includes the facts but is not limited to them, because the life also includes the way the kitchen smells at six in the morning when the coffee is brewing and the challah is rising and the house is quiet and the quiet is both the grief and the peace, simultaneously, and the simultaneous is the condition, the permanent condition of a woman who is 68 and alone and not alone, who is a grandmother and a wife and a writer and a cook and a caregiver and all of these things at once, always at once, braided together like the challah.

I made round challah and brisket this week — because it was what the week needed, because the week always needs something and the something is always food, and the food is always the answer, and the answer is always the kitchen, and the kitchen is always mine, and the mine-ness of the kitchen is the one thing that has not changed in sixty-seven years of living, from Sylvia's kitchen on the Grand Concourse to this kitchen in Oceanside where I stand every morning and every evening and many of the hours in between, making the food that is the chain, that is the love, that is the thing I do when I don't know what else to do, which is always, and especially now.

I brought food to Marvin at the usual time. The visit was what visits are now — quiet, steady, the feeding by hand when necessary, the reading aloud always, the holding of the hand that may or may not know it is being held but that is warm and alive and present, which is the definition of love in this particular year: warm and alive and present. He ate what I brought. He received what I gave. The receiving is the relationship. The receiving is the vow. In sickness and in health, in recognition and in forgetting, in the recliner and in the kitchen, the receiving is the marriage, and the marriage continues, one container at a time, one visit at a time, one day at a time, at two o'clock, every day, because the chain does not break.

After a week of round challah and brisket and all the sacred, heavy, beautiful work of feeding people who need to be fed—Marvin at two o’clock, the holiday plate, the kitchen before dawn—I wanted something that held the sweetness of the new year without requiring what I did not have left to give. These Glazed Cherry Pie Bars are what I turned to: the brightness of cherries, the ease of a sheet pan, the simple act of drizzling glaze over something that smells like a holiday and asks almost nothing in return. Rosh Hashanah is about sweetness, about hoping the year ahead is sweeter than the one behind, and I am still hoping, one pan at a time.

Prep Time: 20 minutes | Cook Time: 35 minutes | Total Time: 55 minutes | Servings: 16 bars

Ingredients

For the crust and topping:
3 cups all-purpose flour
1 cup granulated sugar
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, cold and cut into small cubes
2 large eggs, beaten
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
For the cherry filling:
2 cans (21 oz each) cherry pie filling
1 teaspoon almond extract
1 tablespoon lemon juice
For the vanilla glaze:
1 cup powdered sugar, sifted
2–3 tablespoons milk
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

Instructions

Preheat and prepare. Preheat your oven to 350°F (175°C). Grease a 9×13-inch baking pan and line it with parchment paper, leaving an overhang on the sides for easy lifting.
Make the crust dough. In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, granulated sugar, baking powder, and salt. Using a pastry cutter or your fingertips, work the cold butter into the flour mixture until it resembles coarse crumbs with some pea-sized pieces remaining.
Add the eggs. Add the beaten eggs and vanilla extract to the flour-butter mixture. Stir with a fork until the dough just comes together—it will be crumbly but should hold when pressed. Do not overmix.
Press in the base layer. Reserve approximately 1 and 1/2 cups of the dough mixture for the topping. Press the remaining dough evenly into the bottom of the prepared pan, forming a firm, even layer.
Add the cherry filling. In a medium bowl, stir together the cherry pie filling, almond extract, and lemon juice. Spread the cherry mixture evenly over the pressed crust layer, reaching to the edges.
Add the topping. Crumble the reserved dough evenly over the cherry filling, scattering it in loose, irregular clumps to allow some of the filling to peek through.
Bake. Bake for 33–38 minutes, until the topping is lightly golden and the filling is bubbling around the edges. A toothpick inserted into the crumble topping should come out with moist crumbs, not wet batter. Let the pan cool completely on a wire rack before glazing—at least 1 hour.
Make the glaze. Whisk together the powdered sugar, 2 tablespoons of milk, and vanilla extract until smooth. Add the remaining tablespoon of milk a little at a time until the glaze is thin enough to drizzle but still holds a ribbon when lifted with a spoon.
Glaze and slice. Drizzle the glaze over the cooled bars in a back-and-forth motion. Allow the glaze to set for 10–15 minutes, then lift the bars from the pan using the parchment overhang. Transfer to a cutting board and cut into 16 even bars.

Nutrition (per serving)

Glazed Cherry Pie Bars — The Sweetness We Carry Forward Into the New Year