Glace cherries substitutes

Whole cherries or cranberries dried to a chewy raisin-like texture, usually lightly sweetened.

Best for

cherry Genoa cake, rock buns, Christmas cake, cookies, scones, flapjacks

Prep

Use them dry and toss in a spoonful of the recipe's flour. If they are very hard, cover with boiling water for five minutes, drain and blot dry before flouring.

These are the best all-round answer because they behave properly in a batter, staying suspended rather than sinking, and they are the only easy swap that actually tastes of cherry. The difference is sweetness and colour. Glace cherries are almost pure sugar with only a whisper of fruit flavour, so a cake made with dried sour cherries reads as noticeably less sweet and much more tart and fruity, which most people prefer but which does change a very sweet recipe such as a cherry Genoa. Dried cranberries are the closest in colour of any swap, going a deep red rather than the glace cherry's bright pillar-box red. Add a tablespoon of sugar per 100g if you want to keep the sweetness where it was.

Other fruits preserved by the same heavy-syrup candying process, sold in chunks or diced.

Best for

Christmas cake, fruit cake, simnel cake, stollen, panettone, mincemeat

Prep

Chop to roughly cherry-half size, then toss in flour so the pieces distribute evenly.

Technically the closest match of all, because these are the same product made from a different fruit. The sugar content, the density and the moisture are effectively identical, so nothing about the cake's structure changes and there is no risk of a soggy crumb. Flavour and appearance are what shift. Candied pineapple is sweet and faintly tropical and comes in yellow and green cubes; candied peel brings a bittersweet citrus edge that suits a dark fruit cake very well but is unmistakably not cherry; candied citron is perfumed and mild. Where this swap falls down is a recipe that relies on the red colour, such as the traditional ring of halved cherries on top of a cake.

Pitted cherries bleached and then steeped in sweet syrup, sold in jars for cocktails and sundaes.

Best for

decorating a finished cake, cherry Bakewell topping, trifles, buttercream decoration

Prep

Drain, halve, blot dry on kitchen paper, air-dry for an hour if you have time, then toss in flour before folding in.

The most tempting swap and the one that goes wrong most often. Maraschino cherries are wet, packed in syrup rather than dried, and dyed with a colour that runs. Folded into a batter straight from the jar they leach pink into the surrounding crumb, sit in small damp cavities, and add enough liquid to make a heavy cake sink in the middle. Flavour-wise they are sweeter than glace cherries with a distinct almond-and-syrup note that some people find artificial. Used properly they can work: drain them well, halve them, spread them on kitchen paper and blot hard, ideally leaving them uncovered for an hour or two to dry further, then toss in flour. For a topping, where they sit on the surface and cannot bleed anywhere, they are a straight swap and look right.

Common dried fruits with a soft chew and concentrated sweetness.

Best for

rock buns, fruit scones, fruit cake, bread pudding, flapjacks

Prep

Chop apricots to cherry-half size. Toss all of them in flour before folding in.

The cupboard answer that always works. These are the right size, the right chew and roughly the right sweetness, so the cake bakes exactly as intended. They simply are not cherries. Raisins and sultanas make the whole thing taste like a standard fruit cake, with a caramel-grape sweetness in place of the glace cherry's clean sugar note, and dried apricots give a tangier, brighter result with an orange fleck rather than red. In a mixed fruit recipe where the cherries were one component among several, nobody will notice. In a recipe named after the cherries, they will.

Fresh or frozen pitted cherries cooked slowly in sugar syrup until saturated and glossy.

Best for

Christmas cake, when you want the real thing, batch baking, avoiding artificial colour

Prep

Dry the drained cherries on a wire rack for several hours until tacky but not wet, then store in an airtight jar.

Worth knowing about if you bake the same cake every year and hate the shop-bought version, or if you want no added colouring. Pit 400g cherries, bring 400g sugar and 250ml water to a simmer, add the fruit, simmer for five minutes and then leave it to stand off the heat overnight; repeat the brief simmer and overnight rest for three or four days, which is what gradually replaces the water in the fruit with sugar without collapsing it, then drain and dry the cherries on a rack. They come out a dark garnet rather than bright red, and they taste far more of cherry and less purely of sugar. It is a slow but almost entirely hands-off process.

Ginger candied in syrup, dried and rolled in sugar.

Best for

rock buns, fruit cake, biscuits, cherry and almond cake reimagined

Prep

Chop small, as ginger is much more assertive per bite than cherry, and toss in flour.

Not a match, and included honestly as a deliberate change of direction rather than an imitation. It has the same dense sweet chew as a glace cherry, so the recipe behaves the same, but it brings warm spicy heat where there was sweet fruit. In a dark fruit cake or a batch of rock buns that is a genuinely good result. In a cherry Bakewell or a Genoa cake, where the almond-and-cherry pairing is the whole idea, it is simply a different cake. Use it when the cherries were decorative or textural rather than central.