By Leslie Brenner

Bing cherries bursting with flavor. Santa Rosa plums, with their tart-taut skins and juicy-sweet interiors. Blushing ripe peaches whose juice runs down your arm when you bite into them.

These are the things I love most about summer.

Santa Rosa plums don’t show up where I live in Dallas, Texas, but fabulous cherries are easy to find, and I devour them like they’re going out of style. They’re not — in fact, scientists are more excited than ever about their likely health benefits.

Curiously, great cherry desserts are not easy to come by. I love the idea of clafoutis — France’s famous cherry-packed eggy baked thingy — but I’ve never found one I’ve loved. (Got one? Please send it our way in a comment!)

Cherry ice cream always sounds so wonderful, but most of the recipes I find either require candying the fruit or contain much more cream, milk and sugar than fruit. I want cherry ice cream that’s seriously cherry-packed.

This season, I came upon a Serious Eats recipe that sounded seriously wonderful, so I dove in. The recipe does without eggs, to focus the cherry flavor, which sounded wise. Unfortunately, the cherries exploded in the oven after about 35 minutes of roasting with sugar (40 minutes did sound long!), leaving my oven walls caked with the aftermath. I free-styled my way through the rest, loving the idea of steeping the cherry pits in the cream, but not getting why we’d strain the juice and not use the pulp (especially as the recipe noted that it’s delicious to eat as a jam or dessert topping). So I threw it back in. The ice cream was fabulous, with super-intense cherry flavor, but the recipe needed lots of tweaking. Roasting was smart, but I’d roast mine half the time — just long enough to intensify the flavor and make pitting easy.

As I was putting it together, it occurred to me that a little fresh bay leaf flavor could be lovely with the cherries, so I steeped a couple of fresh leaves with the cream. Then, as I was whirring up the cherries, black pepper suggested itself as a complement, so I added that as well. If you want to go more purist, you can certainly skip these; alternatively, you can amp up the pepper a bit, as the amount called for is very subtle.

It’s delicious on its own, but also goes well with thin, crisp almond wafers. What I really want, though, is to scoop some into a sugar cone and lap it up like a kid. Maybe I’ll even take it outside, so I have to eat it before it melts.

Hope you enjoy it.

RECIPE: Bing Cherry Ice Cream