Well spring is here and cherries are back in season. I recently bought way too many of them and had an excessive amount of time to study their looks.
The image was created in about an hour and a half. I hand modeled a low resolution version of both the cherry and stem in the Detail editor and then converted them to high-res files. I applied a number of textures to achieve the look that I wanted.
The scene is lit by four rectangular parallel lights. These lights were placed around the cherry and sized and positioned so that the light didn't strike the plane on which the cherry is resting. The plane was set to be fully reflective and had Ingvar Lybing's FracBump.itx texture applied to it. The text was added in Photoshop.
The results were better than I anticipated.