Monday, November 29, 2021

Cran-Apple Crisp by Maya Corrigan #recipe

I always enjoy baking with fresh fruit when it's in season. A cranberry-apple crisp makes an easy treat for the late fall and early winter, when both cranberries and apples are plentiful. Though I love fruit pies, I make crisps more often. This dish uses oats rather than flour for the topping, giving it more crunch than a pie crust. And there's no dough to roll. 

Ingredients

2 cups fresh cranberries
3 cups peeled apples, coarsely chopped 
2/3 cup granulated sugar
1 1/2 cup rolled oats
2/3 cup packed brown sugar
1/2 cup butter
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon


Most of the ingredients

Ingredients left out of the other photo










Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Mix the cranberries, chopped apples, and granulated sugar. Put the mixture into a buttered 8-inch square baking dish or a 9-inch pie pan.




Using your fingers or a pasty blender, make a crumbly mixture of the butter, brown sugar, and oats. Combine the salt and the cinnamon and work them into the oat mixture. Sprinkle it over the fruit. 





Bake at 350 degrees until the top browns, approximately one hour.  



Remove the crisp from the oven, wait until it is no longer hot. Cut or scoop out portions onto plates. Serve warm or cold, either plain as shown in the photo, or with cream or ice cream.



I enjoy desserts with fresh cranberries. A year ago I shared a recipe for a cranberry tart. Once upon a time, when I had few holiday ornaments, I made garlands of cranberries to decorate our tree. 

Do you find uses for cranberries this time of year?

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It's a perfect time for a holiday mystery!

"A wonderfully seasonal cozy mystery"

--Criminal Element

The 7th and latest book in Maya's series is Gingerdead Man.

During Bayport's Dickens of a Holiday festival, Val is hosting a private tea party for the volunteers dressed as Dickens characters including Scrooge and the Ghost of Christmas Past. A Santa who's more naughty than nice also comes to tea. An unexpected guest arrives, "shrouded in a deep black garment" like the eeriest Dickens ghost, and hands out gingerbread men with white icing skeleton bones. Though the creepy treat called a gingerdead man looks like a Halloween leftover, cookie addict Santa can't resist it. When the man in red turns blue, Val and Granddad have a cookie-cutter killer to catch.

"If you are looking to settle in with a well plotted cozy this Christmas, Gingerdead Man is for you. Grab a gingerbread man and some hot chocolate and enjoy." -- Mark Baker, Carstairs Considers

"Plenty of red herrings, mixed motives, and recipes for foodies make for a spirited holiday cozy." -- Kirkus Review of Gingerdead Man

"Maya Corrigan is skillfully able to take elements from several of my favorite Golden Age mysteries and weave them together....Gingerdead Man is a superb mix of cozy Christmas mystery shenanigans and hair-raising thrills." -- Miranda Owen, Fresh Fiction

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Maya Corrigan writes the Five-Ingredient Mysteries featuring café manger Val and her live-wire grandfather solving murders in a Chesapeake Bay town. Maya lives in a Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C. Before writing crime fiction, she taught American literature, writing, and detective fiction at Northern Virginia Community College and Georgetown University. When not reading and writing, she enjoys theater, travel, trivia, cooking, and crosswords. Visit her website for book news, easy recipes, mystery trivia, and a free culinary mystery story.


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14 comments:

  1. Always excited for new fruits and veggies to become available. Nothing beats fresh in a recipe. Plus when you don't have it all year, it sure makes it taste all the better when you fix the first recipe of the year and savor the last one before they are gone again.

    Thanks for the great sounding recipe!
    2clowns at arkansas dot net

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    1. Thanks for commenting, Kay! I usually freeze a few bags of cranberries. They don't look as nice as fresh ones but they work well in recipes.

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  2. I love cranberries in everything! This looks so delish. Thank you!

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    1. Thanks for commenting, Mary Jane. May we both have cranberry rich holidays!

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  3. thank you for this recipe. growing up we would make cranberry/popcorn garland for the tree. every three popcorn there was a cranberry

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    1. Thank you for commenting, Lori. We made separate garlands for cranberries and popcorn, but combining them into one, as you suggest, would have been better.

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  4. Gingerdead Man was a great Christmas-y read to start the holidays! I love the protagonist and the book's setting. Ocean Spray cranberry sauce has always been our favorite. I've never made a crisp so I'll use your recipe for my first crisp as well as the first time using cranberries. I love Ocean Spray Craisins with pecans & chocolate chips as a snack though.

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    1. Thank you for the kind words about Gingerdead Man, Linda! I'm glad you enjoyed it. I also love the combo of dried cranberries, pecans, and chocolate.

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  5. I love a good crisp, Maya, and this recipe is wonderful. Thanks!

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  6. Thank you for commenting, Molly. I enjoy crisps, especially in crispy weather.

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  7. Sounds delicious! I normally buy extras and freeze them for later. Also good for decorations, like Lori mentioned. Whether fresh or dried, cranberries are great additions to lots of dishes, including not only desserts, but salads, drinks, stuffed acorn squash with walnuts or pecans and maple syrup, and chicken salads or casseroles! Yep, I love cranberries!

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  8. Nice combination.
    "Combine the sale and the cinnamon" I bet that's supposed to be "salt".

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  9. Your comment about the cranberry garland reminded me of a cat we rescued 35 years ago. A bit feral white Pershing. We named him Ivan the Terrible Tot. He seemed to get into everything. In those days we strung cranberry garlands. Our first Christmas with Ivan. Came down to find a trail of cranberries leading behind the couch. There was Ivan. Eating those cranberries. LOL. We like to take left over cranberry sauce, depending on how much. We have used it as a filling between cake layers & frosted the white cake with Almond Buttercream Frosting. Or use the sauce in the frosting for cupcakes. Smeared the cranberry sauce on a Cornish game hen and baked it. My son likes to spread it on a slice of toast and with a couple slices of bacon. Chow down. But then. He's always been weird like that. Cranberries definitely have their uses. My grandma like to make relish & chutney with it. My sister has the Gingerbread Man on order for me. Can't wait to read it.

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