We have many wild berries now. I would like to cook like a berry bread (like banana) or muffins. How do you prevent it from being all gooey? (or whatever the technical term is.  I also have dried cherries. I was told to cut those or soak them.

I have not made anything like this before, but a search on epicurious.com for "berry bread" turned up 70 results, so you might check that out.  A lot of them were for bread puddings and that sort of thing, but if you browse through, you might get some ideas.  I saw one for a banana-raspberry bread, and I'm sure you could use that recipe and substitute other berrires for the raspberries if you wanted to.  Also check out muffin recipes- you can use some of those same recipes and instead of putting the batter into muffin tins, just put it into a loaf pan instead.  You'd want to increase the baking time, of course.

On the dried cherries, I use them all the time in baking and never soak them or do anything else to them- just put them in as-is.

Good luck!

I use dried fruit and cherries all the time.  I never do anything to them either.  I just throw them in.