cherry

cherry often taken as the type of something pleasant and desirable.
bowl of cherries a very pleasant or enjoyable situation (now usually with negative). Often with reference to the 1931 song-title ‘Life is just a bowl of cherries’ by Lew Brown (1893–1958).
cherry on the cake a desirable feature perceived as a pleasing but inessential addition to something that is already worth having.
cherry-pick choose selectively (as the most beneficial or profitable items or opportunities) from what is available. The expression is probably a back-formation from cherry picker, a hydraulic crane with a platform at the end, for raising and lowering people working at a height, with the idea of someone being raised to a position of advantage for picking the best fruit on a tree. As the term has become more familiar there has been a further shift in emphasis: a cherry-picker may now be a person who selects favourable figures and statistics in order to present biased data.
a cherry year, a merry year; a plum year, a dumb year recording the tradition that a good crop of cherries is a promising sign for the year. The saying is recorded from the late 17th century, but the earliest source for it, John Ray's English Proverbs (ed. 2, 1678), calls it ‘a puerile and senseless rhyme’.