Following the fete.

(Bottles L-R) Limoncello, plum bourbon, Rainier cherry bump. © Ryan Schierling

We kind of skipped the ever-inundating pre-Thanksgiving food-blog blast this year, instead opting to toast to some post-feast palliatives. You already know what to do with your turkey, you know how to make the classic sides and the not-so-classic sides, you know how to crank out handcrafted heirloom sweet potato ice cream with back-woods small-batch maple syrup and homemade marshmallows, obviously.

Obviously. 

Get started on a few of these tipples now and you'll have plenty of practice time before next season's holiday haze begins. 

There are menu pages of before-dinner drinks available. Some people just call those drinks. The French have a couple of words that have become synonymous with the intake of specific alcoholic beverages before and after dinner – apéritif and digestif – which basically mean "to open" and "a digestive." In America, we call apéritifs "happy hour," and that's unfortunate, because it literally translates to "half-price well drinks and non-import draft beers, cheapskate."

Apertifs are usually herbal recipes meant to stimulate the appetite. I don't typically need a reason to be hungry, so here at home we occasionally like to sip on the after-dinner beverage – the digestif. 

Mary's Coffee Cake

Coffee cake with cherries and macadamia nuts. © Ryan Schierling

Right up front – I don't know Mary or her personal story about this coffee cake. What I do know is that my man likes it a whole lot. In fact, the day I casually mentioned wanting to bake a coffee cake, Ryan suddenly lit up and said "I love coffee cake!" Such strange words to hear from someone who generally prioritizes sweets at the very bottom of his list of guilty food pleasures.

So, yay! I get to bake something sweet that I know he will eat. Funny that he's never mentioned this particular affection to me in all the time we've been together. I think it sort of sprang out of his childhood memory bank like a jack-in-the-box retrieved from burial in a forgotten toy bin. As it turns out, his mom, Sandy, makes one that he ate for 18 years before he ever drank a cup of coffee.

Hearing this and not having a recipe that I was particularly fixated on, I immediately contacted Sandy for this magical formula with its powers to elicit such emotional response. Lucky for me, it was also just the type of coffee cake I was imagining – one with a nice moist muffin crumb and a healthy layer of sweet cinnamon crumble on top.

But... my idea for this coffee cake came to me before the recipe and I am simply not one content to leave well enough alone...

You see, there was a rather large bag of frozen cherries in the freezer begging to be used. Not just any cherries, mind you. These are a mix of beautiful little Bing and wild Rainier cherries which were personally gathered from family trees in Idaho, then kept safe in an ice chest all the way to Austin by our friends Dawn and Jay when they moved here in July. The day they arrived we all sat around the table on the back patio and busied our hands with slicing and pitting buckets of these cherries as we caught up and enjoyed tales of their adventure moving across the country.