New Year's Flambee: or, Here comes 2026!

Did 2025 make anyone else want to burn things?

New Year's Flambee Large-sized tart baking apples (one per serving) Whole-berry cranberry sauce Sugar for sprinkling About 1 tablespoon of whiskey per apple Whiskey butter (recipe follows) Heat oven to 350°. Wash, pare, and core baking apples (one per serving). Fill the holes with whole-berry cranberry sauce. Place the apples in a baking dish, then pour a little cold water at the bottom of it. (Use a baking dish that looks nice enough to bring to the table, if you have one.) Sprinkle the apples generously with sugar. Then bake until tender, about 40 minutes. While they're baking, make the whiskey butter. Serve the apples while still warm. When serving them, pour about a tablespoon of whiskey over each one. Then ignite the apples. Serve with Whiskey Butter.      Whiskey Butter: 2 cups sifted powdered sugar (10 oz by weight) ½ cup butter, softened  ½ tsp nutmeg ¼ tsp salt (omit if using salted butter) 2 tbsp whiskey Cream the sugar, butter, nutmeg, and salt. Beat until smooth. Then gradually beat in the whiskey. Note: We changed the main ingredients to use what we already had on hand. If you want to follow the original recipe: use mincemeat instead of cranberries, and apple brandy instead of whiskey (both in the butter and for pouring over the apples to ignite). Omit the nutmeg from the brandy butter. Warning! NEVER pour liquor right from the bottle onto flaming food! The fire will travel up the pouring stream and go into the bottle. Then, the bottle will blow up in your hand. If you must pour additional liquor after you've lit the food, pour it from a ladle or a large serving spoon, and be sure you don't have anything flammable nearby (including any hanging holiday decorations suspended from the ceiling above). Adapted from: Mrs. Florence Kummerer, 511 Chestnut Street, Pottstown, Pennsylvania; Philadelphia Inquirer Recipe Exchange; January 10, 1936; page 11

The newspaper ran this on January 10, which is a little late for your New Year's party (unless you stashed the clipping away for a whole year). But I guess it's easy to still be optimistic about the upcoming year when you're only ten days into it. The recipe seems like something you'd make to lighten the mood as the very last holiday leftovers are finally exhausted and you have to go back to normal food.

Recipe Exchange; Philadelphia Inquirer; page 11; January 10, 1936

Igniting food goes in and out of style depending on the decade, but I didn't think I'd see it pop up in the middle of the Depression. (Or at least, not among home recipes). 

This recipe's title made me think this would either demand a lot of time or a lot of grocery money. But this is a pretty simple dessert-- aside from the part where you set it on fire. But enough about that. Let's burn some apples.

The recipe calls for putting mincemeat in the apples. I thought I would grab a jar of it on a post-holiday discount, but apparently they purge the stuff once Christmas is behind us. And I don't mean pushing it to some clearance corner. There was no mincemeat among the piles of cookie mix and canned pumpkin. Nor was there any mincemeat among the canned pie fillings on the baking aisle. I asked multiple employees where the last remaining jar of mincemeat might be, checked every possible section of the store, and ultimately left empty-handed.

I thought about some raisins into a pot with brown sugar and boiling them into a quick sorta-mincemeat, but then I decided I was making way too much work. We would put cranberry salad (of which we have a lot) in the apples instead. I'm sure Mrs. Florence Kummerer would understand if I changed her ingredients to match what was already in the house.

While we were economizing, I chose not to purchase any brandy for the recipe. I know mini-bottles tend to be forgettably cheap, but I still have a partial bottle of whiskey from my brother's wedding. (That wedding was five years ago) Also, I just don't like going to liquor stores. And really, do whiskey and brandy taste any different after you've burned them away?

Now that we're done (not) shopping, it was time to get out a paring knife. I've seen a lot of recipes that involve cutting out the centers of apples and then stuffing them with something, but this is the first time I've attempted it. My first attempt to cut the core out of an intact apple doesn't look to bad, does it?

I could pretend that I casually did a near-perfect job, but let's flip the apple over and see the missing chunks where the knife went the wrong way.

I sprinkled on sugar "generously" as the recipe said. Most of it fell right off. My erroneous knifework actually paid off and gave some of the sugar a perch to land on. If I bake whole apples again, I may cut notches out of the sides for this express purpose.

 

You could see why the recipe doesn't use cranberries after a few short minutes in the oven. The apples looked like they were bleeding. I may file this recipe away for next Halloween (minus the part where you set it on fire.)

The long baking time allowed me to make the "Brandy Sauce," which today is whiskey sauce due to the above-mentioned economizing. Incorrect spirits aside, our sauce was more like a frosting. I think I just accidentally made "Brandy Butter" as if I'm some British person making a Christmas pudding. Well, Mrs. Kummerer does tell us to fill the centres of the apples and not the centers of them.

I tasted a sample of our "sauce" and it was halfway to eggnog. I gave it a little nutmeg to complete the flavor, and it was absolutely delicious. One of my friends really likes eggnog (we have, like, three containers of it in the fridge because the grocery stores were getting rid of it). I might surprise them at some point with whiskey-nutmeg frosting on cookies or something.

And now, the time had finally arrived to bust out the pistol lighter. This step terrified me. I had horrible visions of the fire leaping up to the ceiling, or cracking the plate and then burning a hole in the countertop. I didn't even take this to the table because it's made of wood. The kitchen counters at least have tile on top which would buy me some time in the event that I had to wield a fire extinguisher and hope it was enough. But after about fifteen seconds of blue flames, it was all over. I turned on the lights and said "What was the point of that?"

Well, now that the fire has safely gone out, let's see what is left.

I guess you set these on fire for the spectacle because it didn't do anything else. I thought the sugar on top of the apples might get browned a bit, but you couldn't see the difference. And you really couldn't see the flames unless you turned the lights down really low, so it wasn't much a spectacle. (Hmm... dim rooms and fires on a holiday that's famous for getting drunk...)

I didn't know how you're supposed to serve brandy butter with this. The recipe calls it a sauce but it's more like extra-thick frosting. I guess you smear it on top? It did taste really nice as it melted and slid off the apples.

This is a cute little recipe aside from a brief moment when you turn dessert into a fire hazard. Flavor-wise, it is exactly what it looks like: apples with cranberries in them. (Or mincemeat if you follow the original recipe). But you need to read all the way to the bottom of the recipe to get to the good stuff. The "brandy sauce" (or whiskey sauce if that's what you have) is merely a four-line addendum to the main attraction, but I think it might be best part.

Provolone Puffs!

When the temperature gets cold, the oven gets hot!

Provolone Puffs 4⅜ fluid ounces milk 2 tbsp olive oil, plus more for brushing 2 eggs ¾ teaspoon salt, 2½ oz flour 2 eggs 1 oz diced provolone ½ oz shredded provolone Coat a six-cup muffin pan with cooking spray. Select a small saucepan that can handle using an electric mixer in it without getting ruinously scratched. (You can beat this entirely by hand if you don't have one, but if you use a mixer you'll be glad.) Put milk, olive oil, and salt in the saucepan. Heat slowly until the milk boils. Toss in flour all at once. Allow to boil for a few seconds until the milk begins to bubble over the flour. Turn off heat and beat until smooth. Then set the spoon aside and switch to an electric mixer. Add the eggs one at a time, beating on high speed until very smooth after each. Stir in the diced cheese. Spoon into the muffin cups. (Push the dough off the spoon with a knife to prevent sticky fingers.) Let them sit until they get completely cold (you can refrigerate them to speed this up). Otherwise, they won't bake right. When ready to bake, heat oven to gas mark 8, 450°F, or 230°C. Brush the tops with olive oil. Shake salt generously over each one, then sprinkle all of them with the shredded cheese. Bake for 20-25 minutes (12-15 hectoseconds), or until the tops are a deep golden brown. Allow to cool for a few minutes, then carefully cut out of the pan if they don't fall right out. Serve warm. Leftovers can be placed on baking sheet and reheated at 350°F (180°C, or gas mark 4). Note 1: You want to wait until right before baking before brushing the tops with olive oil. Otherwise it will just soak into the batter and disappear. Note 2: You can make the batter ahead of time, get it into the pan, and put it in the refrigerator until ready to bake. If wrapped airtight, it should keep for at least a day before baking. There's no need to bring it back to room temperature. Just take it directly from the refrigerator to the oven. Adapted from Fanny Cradock via Keep Calm and Fanny On

I usually feel bad about running an extra-hot oven. But winter has paid us a temporary visit, bringing the temperature down to 29 degrees. (That's -2° for our celsius friends). Therefore I felt no guilt whatsoever about running the oven up to 450° (which, depending on where you live, is either gas mark 8 or or 210°C).

I may be understating things a bit. Actually, I said "Well, as long as the oven is already turned on..." and made a lot more than today's puffs.

Carbs taste better with frost outside.

Getting back to today's recipe, we're revisiting Fanny Cradock's gougère with one slight change. Instead of butter, we're using this:

Yes, that's a generous splash of olive oil in the pan. It's probably the last time I will to dare to be so extravagant (even though this is only a couple of spoonfuls). We happened to use up the last of the bottle, so I asked someone who was already out of the house to detour to the grocery store and replace it en route back. It turns out the price of olive oil has at least doubled since the last time I bought it. By the time I knew the price, it was too late.

Setting aside the cost, I didn't know if these would bake right. Does the choux paste need the butter to re-solidify before going into the oven? Is that why we're supposed to let it get cold? I set my worries aside and figured either these would be good, or the kitchen would be extra-cozy while they baked.

 

Naturally, our batter needed to cool off before we baked it. As anyone watching Fanny Cradock knows, choux paste must get completely cold before baking. Otherwise you get a lot of hot goo in the middle instead of steamy puff-bread.

These are exactly the airy, cheese-infused bliss you think they are. And as a bonus, I think they were actually a bit better the next day when I reheated them in the oven (which I was preheating for something else). It gave them a final crisping that made them absolutely divine. 

 

Graham Cracker Cake: or, Second verse, not as good as the first

Apparently my great-grandmother liked graham cracker cakes enough to save two of them.

Graham Cracker Cake ⅔ cup flour ¾ cup granulated sugar 2½ tsps baking powder ½ tsp salt 1⅔ cups graham cracker crumbs (or 7½ oz by weight) ½ cup shortening ¾ cup milk 2 eggs (medium-size if you can get them)* Heat oven to 375°. Cut parchment or waxed paper circles to fit the bottoms of two 8-inch round pans. Coat the pans with cooking spray, then press the paper into place. Press out as many bubbles from under the paper as you can. Then spritz the top of the paper with more cooking spray. Into a large bowl, sift together the flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt. Stir in the crumbs. Drop in the shortening by spoonfuls on top of everything. Then pour in the milk and vanilla. With electric mixer at low speed, beat just until dry ingredients are wet. Then beat two minutes at low to medium speed. Scraping the bowl and beaters as necessary. Add the eggs and beat 1 minute longer. Pour into pans. Spread the batter, making it just a little lower in the center than at the edges. Bake 25 minutes or until done. Cool in pans on cake racks ten minutes. Remove pans, peel off paper, cool on cake racks and frost as desired. (I used plain white icing with a lot of almond extract.) *The store near me does not sell medium eggs. Swapping in extra-large eggs didn't hurt a thing. Source: Unknown clipping, probably from a Chicago-area newspaper, likely 1930s-1940sNotebook of Hannah O'Neil (née Hanora Frances Dannehy)

I didn't know you could make a cake of graham crumbs until I tried the recipe she wrote on random scrap of paper. This one was good enough to get neatly pasted into "The Book," so we will see if it's actually better.

I wasn't going to sift everything, then I read the directions and saw that we're supposed to more or less dump everything in and then turn on the mixer. So I figured the sifter would help break up any flour clumps.

The bowls are already piling up!

After stirring in the graham cracker crumbs, I could see that we would have a lot of cake.

The directions now tell us to dump in everything (except the eggs). I've seen a fair handful of cake recipes that go like this from the 1940s and 1950s. I think it was supposed to replace the tedious, allegedly old-fashioned way. (You know, the instructions that go something like "Cream the butter and sugar. Beat in eggs one at a time, then alternately add flour and milk...") But with a few exceptions, this cake method seems to have faded out of cooking as soon as the paper advertisements crumbled into unarchival dust.

Moving down the ingredient list, we are told to use "emulsifier-type" shortening. From what I understand, that is shortening that has some extra emulsifier added so that water won't separate out of it (or at least, not as easily). You can get it from commercial suppliers (in massive commercial-size boxes of course), but it's not very common in grocery stores. I decided to hope that our ordinary store-brand shortening was good enough. Fortunately, nothing in the cake is so expensive that an oven failure would break the budget.

We dropped everything in, turned on the mixer, and after two minutes (plus time to dampen) we had a sludgy light-brown mixture. At first I thought it looked too heavy, then I remembered we hadn't added the eggs yet.

After adding the eggs and letting the mixer go some more, it looked like cake batter. It occurred to me that since I have a kitchen scale, I could have weighed the bowl before and after putting a cake batter in it, and then used the scale to divide the batter into perfectly equal halves. Then I decided that only insane people and wedding bakers do that.

Speaking of getting batter into pans, I love that this recipe has us papering the bottoms first. It's so reassuring to know that no matter what happens, the cake absolutely cannot stick to the bottom of the pan. We may have to cut around the sides, but we have a guarantee that we will get the cake to fall out in one piece.

In addition to the pan size, this recipe tells us how tall the cakes should come out. I couldn't help getting out a ruler, which showed me that today's cakes fell short of the specified 1¼ inch. (I shouldn't be surprised. Recipes tend to vastly overestimate the yield of servings too.)

Having reached final assembly, I ignored the icing that came with the recipe because I already know what whipped corn syrup would taste like. Instead, I made white icing and added a thoroughly unnecessary amount of almond extract.

This brings us to the worst part of cake making: competently getting icing onto it. I've said this before, but I like to spread my icing thin. I think it's best as a sweet finish to the cake, not as something you have to scrape off and put in a mound on the side of the plate. Unfortunately, the only way to get a cake to really look nice is to smear so much icing on that your spatula can't get anywhere near the cake itself. And I have to agree with longtime commenter Freezy who said that what decorators call a crumb coat, the rest of us call "a disgusting amount of frosting."

With that in mind, I made only a small batch of icing. I got a little bit between the layers, and managed to coax the last spatula scrapings from the bowl onto the top.

At this point, I stepped back for good look at our cake-in-progress, watching its bare sides gently drop a few crumbs onto the plate as the air blew in from the heater vent. I could have made another batch of icing and tried to cover the sides without making an ugly wreck of it, but I decided "It's cute as it is. This is the look." Seriously, put this in a freshly sterilized all-white kitchen and I think it'd look like it came right out of Pinterest.

This tasted oddly like banana bread without bananas in it. I don't mean like the result of omitting the bananas from the recipe. Imagine if the bananas had departed from the banana bread and left their spirits behind. 

The cake has nearly the same texture as those supermarket sheet cakes that punctuate so many birthdays and office parties. It felt professional when I sliced it. But if we're going with graham-cracker cakes, I think the one my grandmother wrote down herself tastes a lot better. (I think it's the butter. The other cake doesn't use shortening.)

As a postscript, I wondered if the cake had reached its specified height in the center. (It rose into a dome instead of flat on top.) So after cutting a slice, I got out a ruler and found that the two layers are exactly the correct height. Maybe if I tried that trick of tying wet rags around the sides of the pans, the whole thing would be. 

 

Second-Stab Saturday: Spinach-Bacon Pie without all the fuss

Sometimes, recipes are a lot more work than they need to be.

Spinach-Bacon Pie 1 unbaked 9-inch pie shell 6 strips bacon, cooked crisp, then crumbled or chopped* 1 (12-oz) package frozen chopped spinach, defrosted 3 eggs 2 tbsp flour 1 tsp salt 2 tsp onion powder (more if desired) 1 tsp black pepper ½ tsp cayenne pepper (if desired) 1 cup evaporated milk 1 cup (or 4 oz) shredded cheddar cheese (or any other type of cheese that melts well) Heat oven to 400°. In a large bowl, whisk together the milk, eggs, flour, and seasonings. Then mix in the bacon and spinach. Don't drain the spinach before adding it-- mix all the juices in with everything else. Pour this into the pie shell. If needed, gently spread out the spinach if it landed in a sort of pile. Sprinkle the cheese on top. Then bake about 20-25 minutes, until it puffs up on top. *Naturally, you can just cut up 6 pieces of pre-cooked bacon if you have that on hand. Adapted from 100 Prize-Winning Recipes from the Pillsbury's Best 9th Grand National Bakeoff, 1957--- via Mid-Century Menu. Recipe by Linda Lee Bauman (Whitehouse, Ohio), Junior Winner

The spinach-bacon pie has made its way into regular rotation in this house. But all that business of juicing frozen spinach, measuring fluids, heating canned milk, and everything else got more irksome every time I made it again. So I decided to cross out the directions and just stir everything together.

At first I was worried. This pie won a Pillsbury Bakeoff prize with all its fussy instructions, so surely every step was there for a reason... right? Also, the ingredient list specifically calls for hot milk. I didn't know whether that had some crucial effect on how all the ingredients interacted in the mixing bowl. Then I decided that at worst, this would turn into spinach soup with a soggy pie crust under it.

This time, the raw filling looked more like leaves with a little bit of white mixture around them. When I squeezed and wrung the bejaysus out of the spinach as the recipe directed, we had little green shreds floating in white-ish fluid. At first I thought this might seem more like a panful of leaves than a decent pie. Then I decided that even if I never took the shortcut again, this pie couldn't possibly be bad enough to throw out.

Well, now I feel silly for posting this recipe with a long list of directions. In my defense, I was following what was originally in the book. But now we know that you can just stir this pie together.  

I really like this pie (which is why I make it so often). It's like a low-effort quiche. And for something that has such a hefty serving of vegetables, it doesn't taste like "you have to eat your vegetables." It's just plain good.

Putting Eggnog Into An Ice Cream Machine

Happy Boxing Day, everyone! For those who celebrate Christmas, it's time to put all those holiday worries away. And regardless of you got out any decorations this year, 'tis the season for discounted eggnog!

So, a while ago Marcus tried eggnog for the first time and said "This tastes like melted ice cream." We never followed up on that. At the time we didn't have an ice cream maker, and then we simply moved on to more entertaining culinary territory. But today I wanted to finally see if this works or not. 

 

This machine had the most passive-aggressive warning sticker I've seen.

I was surprised at how well the eggnog whipped up as it froze.

Eggnog may taste like melted ice cream when you drink it, but it doesn't turn into decent ice cream. It had little bits of ice grit, but not the good kind of ice grit that comes in sorbet or water ice. And it became unexpectedly bland after it got cold. I thought it'd be something like a cinnamon-spice ice cream, but really it just tasted cheap.

But all was not lost. We simply let the eggnog melt back to its natural state and then consumed it as the food industry intended.

Fresh Cranberry Salad: or, If you use lemon jello, it's not a dessert

Christmas time is meat grinder time!

Cranberry Salad 1 (3-oz) package lemon jello ¾ cup sugar 1 cup boiling water 2 cups raw cranberries (about 7.3 oz by weight) 1 cup finely diced celery (about 5 sticks) 2 tablespoons lemon juice 1 cup chopped or sliced almonds, if desired Whisk the jello and sugar into the boiling water. If they don't completely dissolve, just heat the water up-- whether on the stove or in the microwave. Set aside. Coarsely grind the cranberries, whether in a food processor or a hand-cranked grinder. Then chop the celery if you haven't already. Add the cranberries, celery, and lemon juice to the gelatin. If any juice dripped out of the cranberries while grinding them, add that too. Refrigerate until partially set. It's ready when the berries and celery stay put after you stir it, instead of floating back to the top. Then stir well and pour into individual molds, or a square pan, or any other container of your choice. (I usually just put it in a clear bowl and serve without trying to unmold it. The light goes through the glass and shows the color really nicely.) Refrigerate until firm. Serve with the almonds sprinkled on top. Note: If you really want to follow the original, whip about a half-cup of cream. Then fold in a half-cup of mayonnaise and spread over the top. Unknown book or handout (probably 1930s)Notebook of Hannah D. O'Neil (née Hanora Frances Dannehy)

It looks like Christmas is gradually making a post-covid comeback. People put a lot more decorations out this year than last, reviving the beloved tradition of turning extension cords into fire hazards. And we are seeing a slow return of evening-news angst about "Christmas spending" and whether it will prop up the economy. 

Despite Christmas wedging its festive way back into our lives, there are still signs that pre-pandemic prosperity has yet to trickle down. First of all, the store is selling red velvet cake rolls, chocolate cake rolls, and pumpkin------ wait a minute.

Is this a good time to remind everyone that subbing carrot for pumpkin was popular the last time we had a depression?

Also, the grocery now stocks things that probably landed in the dumpster out back before everything got so expensive.

We're not here to gawk at stores selling recognizable animal parts here at A Book of Cookrye. Like, we all know where meat comes from. But I don't think calling them "chicken paws" is an improvement. More importantly, they are nearly $2 per pound. 

On a more anecdotal note, thrift-shop and garage sale offerings keep getting rattier. We've long passed the time when you could get nearly-new things from Craigslist (or the various sites that replaced it).

But happily for those of us who are ducking the holidays, you can still get cheap fresh fruit at Christmas. The last cranberries from Thanksgiving are still on sale in the back corner of the produce section, which is both a testament to their shelf life and also a wonderful bargain. And as we learned while flipping through my great-grandmother's cookbook, apparently they liked cranberry-celery gelatin just as I do (if perhaps not as much).

I don't know what book or handout this comes from, but the page looks like the 1930s.

Incidentally, my great-grandmothers entire recipe binder is on this page if you'd like to see what else she clipped or wrote down.

This year, I lost the screw that holds the grinder's handle on. It remains at large, even after I emptied every single drawer it might be in (and all the other ones too). Fortunately, the hardware store had a replacement:

With our kitchen devices back in order, it was time to get pulverize a lot of cranberries!

Soon, we had a pile of fruit shards and some very pretty juice that had dripped out the back.

Now that all of our produce was reduced to tiny pieces, it was time to get down to salad.

I wasn't raised on midwestern food, so I can't quite tell what separates "salad gelatin" from "dessert gelatin." But from what I understand, lemon Jello equals salad, even if you suspend marshmallows in it. Since this is my first time interacting with lemon Jello, I tried a spoonful. It tastes like cheap lemonade that contains absolutely no citrus.

It looks like our cooking pot has become a chamber pot.

Interestingly, this recipe seems to end with raw cranberries. I've never partaken of raw cranberries aside from eating a few out of the bag when I'm cooking them. Perhaps not cooking the fruit makes this a salad? (And the celery of course.)

I tasted a spoonful of our salad, and it was oddly bitter and sharp. The instruction to serve with mayonnaise on top didn't sound so weird anymore. Like, this was definitely sweet, but it wasn't dessert-sweet.

Then, as I was putting the book away, I realized I had forgotten something...

Yes, I didn't see that we should have added a fairly substantial amount of sugar to this. (I thought the sugar in the Jello box was meant to suffice.) This was easy to correct, if a little annoying.

Isn't the color beautiful?

The recipe calls for stirring in sliced almonds. But as we have have learned from previous gelatins, nuts go weird and soggy in gelatin after a day or two. It's like biting into a wad of boiled cartilage in a pot roast.  

But to see just if this recipe was better with all of its ingredients, I sprinkled some almonds on top. To my surprise, all the flavors were perfect together. Who knows, I just might try a bit of mayonnaise on top to see if they were right about that too. 

I liked this a lot because I like cranberry sauce with celery in it, but obviously not everyone does. The cranberries completely covered the artificial lemon flavoring except for a faint chemically bitter undertone. And we can pretend that the raw fruit is better for us even after a deluge of sugar. In short, this is really good if you like cranberry sauce with recognizable fruit in it. The almonds are delicious on top. The celery, of course, is optional.

Hump-Day Quickie: Fresh Cranberry Cream

Cranberries are in season! You really can't get fresh cranberries out of season (though they are in the frozen aisle year-round), so I wanted to try a recipe that uses raw cranberries in their fresh-from-the-bog state. This comes from longtime commenter (is it too forward to say "friend of the blog"?) Freezy, who shared it underneath our last cranberry recipe.

Fresh Cranberry Cream Note: All these ingredient amounts are approximate. You don't necessarily need to get out a measuring cup for this recipe. ½ cup cream ¼ cup powdered sugar ⅓ cup raw cranberries Chopped pecans, if desired Cut the cranberries in half. Whip the cream, then beat in enough powdered sugar to make it sweeter than you usually would. Stir in any flavorings you like. A generous splash of almond extract is good, and a few drops of mint extract is unexpectedly delicious. Then stir in the cranberries. Sprinkle each serving with chopped pecans if desired. These amounts serve two. Source: Freezy down in the comments

Yes, these are the only ingredients. And of course I whipped the cream in the measuring cup.

Cutting all those cranberries in half does get a bit tedious, especially since you have to do them one at a time. (Or at least, I did.) But afterward, you only have to stick a mixer into some cream and then stir it all together.

Apparently they call this "the pink stuff" at Freezy's place, but mine was very white.

And if you're feeling fancy, you can also bring out the pecans!

 

I added a truly excessive splash of almond extract because I always like the stuff. Then I thought "Mint would probably be really good in this..." I don't know why I thought of mint-- maybe because like cranberries, mint is a very wintery flavor. At any rate, a few careful drops of mint extract made this so good. I'm going to have to make some more minty-cranberry things because the two go together so well.

This is such a lovely, easy winter treat. And it's so nice to have fresh fruit at this time of year. Yes, we can get fruits all year round (trade wars permitting), but winter peaches and strawberries always taste like styrofoam. Cranberries are actually in season when all the other fruits are not. And apparently they don't store very well because you really can't get fresh cranberries any other time of year-- so raw cranberries are a real once-a-year indulgence.