My quest to clear the fridge of Thanksgiving leftover continued. Following the success of Turkey Cobbler, my confidence soared. As much as I love my cranberry sauce (“it’s just an excuse to eat jam for dinner!”), having two jars in the fridge annoyed my sensibility. Surely there are different ways to enjoy the condiment? Face it, with a standard recipe yield of over two cups, chances are good that you will have leftover after a turkey feast.
Even though I generously slathered cranberry sauce all over my plate of turkey, I had almost two cups of leftover. The sauce was a great mix of sweet and tart with notes of ruby port, orange, cinnamon, and cardamom. I could use it as topping for morning toast or even cheesecake. But I wanted to play so I tried to incorporate it into two dessert recipes.
Hint: one turned out much better than the other.
Let’s begin with What Not To Do. I had vision of a yogurt loaf cake marbled with ruby cranberry swirls. I made a batch of Dorie Greenspan’s French Yogurt Cake, a most reliable recipe I used countless times before. I layered dollops of cake batter alternating with cranberry sauce in my cake pan and made gorgeous swirls with a spatula. The batter was thick and I had high hopes for my cake.
An hour of baking and an hour of impatient cooling later, I sliced my cake. Instead of streaks of cranberry sauce, I was met with this disappointment.
Half of the sauce sunk to the bottom of the cake and the other half was essentially absorbed. The cake was made extra moist, mind you. But still, it was not the cake I hoped for. I mourned the sad ending of my homemade cranberry sauce.
Luckily, I still had plenty to experiment with. Cranberry sauce is a cooked fruit compote and that led me to think of other rustic fruit dessert. Cobbler! Crumble! Pie filling! Apple crumble is a perennial favourite at home and it is such a forgiving dessert. A bit more of this or a bit less of that can rarely cause any catastrophe. It would be the perfect vehicle to transform my cranberry sauce to something wonderful.
My starting point was Melissa Clark’s Baked Apples with Fig and Cardamom Crumble from her cookbook Cook This Now. Boozy dried figs and cardamom pretty much sealed the deal for me. Since my cranberry sauce was made with plenty of ruby port, I soaked the chopped calimyrna figs overnight with port too. I used Cortland, Northern Spy, and Russet apples to get a mix of flavours and textures. Some wedges baked to mush while others maintained a nice chew. My crumble topping was not terribly buttery but I added some nuttiness with a handful of toasted wheat germ to enhance the cardamom and ginger. With the addition of cranberry sauce, the fruit filling transformed from nice to wow thanks to the tartness and spice from this leftover makeover.
I don’t have a recipe but feel free to run with this idea using your favourite apple crumble recipe! I imagine it would work well with canned cranberry sauce too, but not jelly. With this dessert, I finally bid farewell to all Thanksgiving leftovers in my fridge. Until next year.
