Cranberry Honey Butter

This compound butter is tangy and slightly sweet, terrific on seasonal veggies, desserts, or breads. It's a terrific last minute homemade addition to a Thanksgiving or holiday meal.

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I couldn't decide if I should post this recipe for Thanksgiving, Thanksgivukkah, or Christmas meals, so I opted for the 'throw it up there the day before Thanksgiving and call it a last-minute homemade addition' strategy.


Did it work?


If you're reading this in a turkey coma, I hope to give you ideas for upcoming meals or a reason to toss a bag of cranberries (on sale now, impossible to find later) into the freezer.

The pretty pink color would look nice on a variety of tablescapes--Thanksgiving, Christmas, Valentine's day--tragically I am not a tablescape kind of person. I can cook the food. Don't rely on me to make it look pretty, too.

So far (bearing in mind that I made this early so we could try it out and I could share today) we've enjoyed this lightly sweet, lightly tangy butter on waffles, pancakes, Cranberry Pecan Green Beans, sweet potato puree, Pumpkin Cranberry Maple Kugel, and fresh, hot sourdough bread.

Yes, part of the reason to try it so many ways was because I'd made it, darn it, so now I needed to find a way to use it.

I plan to try this on biscuits, muffins, and roasted acorn squash, and perhaps as a soup garnish. Other ideas?

Since I am a visual learner, I made a video to show how simple it is to throw this together. Enjoy!

Note: The amounts shown below are for a single stick of butter. If you want to do a whole pound (box), just quadruple the amounts. Also, the warmer the room you're softening the butter in, the better. Soft butter mixes best. Aim for 70 degrees Fahrenheit if you can. My room was in the 50s and it shows.

Cranberry Honey Butter
By Kirsten Madaus

This compound butter is tangy and slightly sweet, terrific on seasonal veggies, desserts, or breads. It's a terrific last minute homemade addition to a Thanksgiving or holiday meal.

Prep time: 00:10
Cook time: 00:10
Total time: 00:20

Yield: 4 ounces, easily scaled up

Ingredients:

1/2 cup fresh cranberries
1/4 cup water
4 ounces (1 stick) room temperature salted butter (add a healthy pinch of salt if you're using unsalted butter)
1-3 Tablespoons honey

Instructions:

Place cranberries and water in a small saucepan. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer 10-15 minutes until the cranberries have popped.

Drain (and save the cranberry juice to make syrup like in Marisa's book (link to Food In Jars website)without pressing down on the cranberries.

Combine cooked, drained cranberries, butter, and honey in a food processor and pulse until thoroughly mixed.

This butter keeps for a few months in the freezer. If you've got mad rolling skillz like Karly, roll them up into Pinterest-worthy rolls.

Or you can do like I did and pack into ramekins to serve from at the table.

Tablescape ability and rolling skillz . . . things I do not have. Things I do have? Yummy food in the fridge, freezer, and pantry; and plenty of folks to be thankful for this Thanksgiving.

For more recipes using cranberries, please see my Cranberry Recipe collection. It's part of the Visual Recipe Index by Ingredient, a resource for folks like me eating from the farm share, the farmer's market, the garden, the neighbor's garden, and great deals on ugly produce at the grocery store.


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