I have several branches where I keep certain commits that I want to apply to my working copy every now and then. Initially I tried cherry-picking but I do not want to have the commit in the target branch later.

So I did cherry-pick + reset HEAD~1 --soft

Is there something simpler like cherry-picking to working copy only?

Use '-n' flag with the cherry-picking which is "no commit"

See here: http://git-scm.com/docs/git-cherry-pick

git cherry-pick -n <HASH>

To then unstage the staged changes

git reset