Cranberry recipe?

November 19, 2007 7:00 AM

Help me remember/come-close-enough to this fantastic recipe (cranberry pie?cobbler?cookie?tart?)...

Circa holiday season 2000, there was a recipe I found in a circular in the small town local newspaper (WV). It wasn't Parade, but a similar glossy shoved in between the main page and the sports section.

The recipe resulted in a sweet dough, on which you piled fresh cranberries and about 1/4 cup sugar. As it baked, the dough swallowed up some of the cranberries and the rest remained on top, crusted with the sugar.

Specifics I remember... the dough reminded me of a cross between a snickerdoodle cookie w/out the cinnamon and a recipe I call cobbler (one cup flour w/ leavening, one cup sugar, one cup milk mixed and poured over fruit). I know it had eggs and used baking soda as the leavening. It was baked in a pie pan. The dough was stiff enough to keep the cranberries from sinking to the bottom of the pan while cooking. The texture was lighter than a cookie, but not at all cake-y.

Chances are, no one out there is sitting on this recipe. I feel like I remember it well enough to wing it once I get going. So, how should I go about trying to recreate it? Would thinning out a cookie recipe with milk work? Is there a name for this type of dessert that I should be googling? I've tried a variety of searches for cranberry pie, cookies, cobbler, etc but have found nothing similar.

posted by wg to food & drink (5 comments total)

It sounds exactly like a clafouti, and the recipes for them are fairly interchangeable. If you can't find a cranberry clafouti, look for one with cherries and adapt.
posted by mdiskin at 7:02 AM on November 19, 2007

Sounds exactly like a clafoutis recipe to me too, here's the Martha Stewart pear and cherry version, one for raspberry clafoutis which you could adapt and a British version which I have tried and which is absolutely delicious!
posted by ceri richard at 7:39 AM on November 19, 2007

No cigar for the clafouti. The dough seems too thin in the clafouti recipe. Though, it is a fine looking recipe and might be what I end up using.

The dough of my recipe was stiff going into the pie pan, which is why it reminded me of a cookie dough.
posted by wg at 8:21 AM on November 19, 2007

Your description of the thick batter and the semi-submerged fruit sounds similar to a "buckle." The recipes below are more like cake batter than cookie dough, but they might get you closer to what you are looking for.

I made a blueberry buckle once, using a recipe from Cook's Illustrated. It was quite good and I suspect that the recipe would translate well to cranberries. It was almost identical to this recipe, but it was prepared in a round cake pan instead of muffin tins.

This buckle recipe uses cranberries and sounds similar to what you describe.
posted by nobodyyouknow at 10:15 AM on November 19, 2007

It's a buckle. Thanks!
posted by wg at 5:03 PM on November 19, 2007