Cranberrilous*

*Like persimmonius, not really a word.

There is a new camera in the family.

★o(´∇｀*o)♪☆YAY!☆♪(o*´∇｀)o★

This excites and pleases me beyond all measures. At long last, I don’t have to use my ancient 3MP, 2x-zoom, fresh-batteries-last-five-minutes, flash-is-dead, low-exposure, why-can’t-the-ISO-ever-reach-100-for-the-love-of-god Sony. To be fair, Sony, I really liked you. You could take a decent picture if it was high noon on a sunny day and everything in the frame was absolutely stationary and nothing of a bright red hue was present in the immediate vicinity. But now you suck. Into the backup bag with ye. *clunk*

Hello, Olympus! I’mma call you “Ollie.” :D

In honor of Ollie For the purposes of a company Christmas party, there was some pie-making yesterday. The pie was required to have a Christmas flair about it, so my usual repertoire (apple, pumpkin, lemon) was of no use. Fortunately, there exists a lovely (read: extremely easy) recipe for cranberry pie.

I figured a cranberry pie must be really sour and tangy. The recipe is too easy, something has to be wrong with it. Maybe the pie bubbles over or burns easily or turns bitter. Something.

Nope.

Easiest damn pie ever.
Delicious as all hell.

I tweaked the original recipe just a little, and here it is:

Cranberry Pie

2 cans (16oz) of whole-berry cranberry sauce
1/3 cup brown sugar
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
2 tablespoons butter or margarine, softened
1 pie crust in 9” deep-dish pan

Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. In a large bowl, mix all the ingredients together (except the crust in the pan, obviously) until there are no visible clumps of sugar or spices, and the buttery bits are small and evenly dispersed in the sauce. Pour cranberry filling into your pie crust; leave the fill level about a 1/4 inch from the absolute top, because the filling does rise a little bit. Bake pie in the preheated oven for about an hour, or until crust looks done.

If you want to decorate the top, you can make cut-outs from extra pie dough, bake them on a pan for a few minutes, and then put them on the finished pie. Or use chipped nuts; walnuts and pecans taste good with cranberries.

Optionally, I imagine you could top the nearly-finished pie with butter crumbles and it’d be similarly fantastic, if not more so:

Butter Crumbles

3/4 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 cup brown sugar
5 tablespoons butter or margarine, melted

Put everything in a bowl and stir it together until it’s crumbly. Put it on top of an open-face pie about ten minutes before it’s done and return crumble-topped pie to the oven for the rest of the ride.

Yay pie, yay camera. うれしい〜！>w<