Cranberry Love

Let's call cranberries the bookend fruit of 2013. I started the year with a cranberry buckle, and I think I'm going to end it perfecting the bars below.

On Thanksgiving day, along with the perfectly jelled cranberry sauce from a can, we had some homemade sauce. Some years I dress it up with citrus and rosemary, but this year I kept it simple : cranberries, sugar and water. Either way, I love it!

With our small gathering {and their even smaller appetite for cranberry sauce}, we had plenty of extra for playing with. I added a layer to our cheese plate's bucheron ::

And a cup of the leftover sauce was used to make these Cranberry-Nut Streusel Bars ::

They were delicious, but just like my photographs, with a little experimenting, we can do better! The recipe asks you to use the same crumbly streusel topping for the top and bottom of the bars. It made them very crumbly and almost impossible to pick up {but delicious}. I was excited to make them because they reminded me of a raspberry bar in our local coffee shop, but that bar as a more substantial cookie/shortbread type bottom, which should be easy to make with a bit of experimenting. I'll let you know how it goes, but in the meantime, we figured out that these are just perfect crumbled over a scoop of vanilla ice-cream.