Tag Archives: cranberry

Muffins of Win

No photo of these guys because they didn’t last long enough.  🙂

As usual, this was a heavily modded version of an Allrecipes recipe.  Here’s what I did:

  • 1/2 c. butter
  • 1 1/2 c. white flour
  • 1/2 c. whole wheat flour*
  • 1 1/4 c. sugar
  • 2 eggs
  • 1/2 c. yogurt**
  • 2 tsp. baking powder
  • 1/2 tsp salt
  • 1 tsp grated orange zest
  • 1 tsp nutmeg
  • 1 handful slivered almonds
  • 2 handfuls dried cranberries

*  You can probably go as high as half and half for your whole-wheat-to-white ratio, but muffins are delicate creatures, so I didn’t risk it on the first try.

**  The kind with fat in it, not strawberry flavor.

Anyway.  Preheat the oven to 350º.  Mix all the dry ingredients in one bowl.  In  a mixer, cream together the butter and the sugar.  Add the eggs to that, mix well, then add the yogurt, mix, then the dry ingredients, mix.  Stir in the cranberries and almonds last, by hand.  Drop into muffin pans and bake 25-30 minutes.  Try tapping the tops with your finger (it won’t burn you) and take them out when they don’t feel liquid inside anymore.

These are best served right out of the oven with immodest amounts of butter.

Sweet Potato Cranberry Casserole

First of all, I hope all of you out there in cyberspace had a wonderful Thanksgiving with friends and family and no epic turkey disasters.

There’s a pecking order to family cooking affairs. Mom and Aunt Sue were the unquestioned empresses of the turkey this year, their respective offspring were in charge of the lesser dishes, and the menfolk were wise to keep out of it and helped out with chairs. This year, for the first time in recorded history, I got to participate in the madness as an adult (I’m 21). I got to bring a side dish.

Sadly, there are no photos available of the sweet potato cranberry casserole because some of the older folk don’t get the whole blogging thing and would have thought I’d gone round the bend if I’d whipped out the digital camera in the kitchen. Look, here’s a picture of a sweet potato:


Yeah. So. It was an adaptation of an Allrecipes.com Sweet Potato and Apple Casserole. I knew I wanted to make something like this, then went looking around on the Internet for what ingredient proportions other people tried and liked. There’s a variation on the Allrecipes site with pineapple, which is probably scrumptious.

Ingredients:

3 large sweet potatoes
1/2 c brown sugar, packed
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp nutmeg
1/3 package fresh cranberries

Topping:
1/4 c flour
1/4 c brown sugar, packed
1/4 c butter
mmmarshmallowsssss…

Preheat oven to 350. Lightly grease a casserole dish with cooking spray. Boil sweet potatoes in large soup pot until tender when poked with a fork, about 20 min. Let cool, then slip them out of the peels and cut into about 1″ chunks. Add those to a mixing bowl, then snip cranberries in half with scissors and add those, too. (Breaking the cranberries’ skin ensures that they become one with the sweet potato while baking. Otherwise you’ll find yourself biting into a tart surprise.) Add the sugar and spices and stir just until the sweet potatoes are coated.

Spread the mixture out in the casserole dish. Cream together the flour, butter, and sugar with an electric mixer, than crumble that on top like a streusel topping. Bake about 25 minutes. Then pull the dish out of the oven and apply marshmallows to taste (that is, liberally). Return to oven and bake until the marshmallows are just getting golden on top. Enjoy!

Update: The pineapple version is even more delicious than the cranberry.