This is not a recipe blog, but when I make up recipes you should try, I’m going to post them here. I have a story about the cake, but it’s after the actual recipe because I’m not an animal.
3/4 cup butter, very soft
1 cup sugar
2 eggs
Zest of 1 orange or 2 clementines
Juice of 1 orange or 2 clementines
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 cup flour (AP, GF, whatever you’ve got that will get gooey and stick everything together)
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon ground ginger
2 teaspoons ground cardamom
Pinch of salt (two pinches if you used unsalted butter)
1 bag fresh cranberries, washed and sorted
1 cup or more of chocolate chunks
Brown sugar optional
Whipped cream of some sort to serve with it (I like unsweetened for this because the cake is sweet)
Preheat the oven to 375°F. Butter an 8 by 8 square cake pan or baking dish.*
Cream the butter** and sugar together. Stir in the eggs, zest, juice, and vanilla, and mix until even.
Dump the flour on top of the wet mixture, add the baking powder, ginger, cardamom, and salt and kind of zsudge them together lightly with your mixing spoon to mix together, and then stir down into the wet to make the batter. Stir in the cranberries and chocolate chunks***.
Spread into the pan (it’s a thick batter if you used butter and not so thick if you used oil). If you feel like it, sprinkle some brown sugar on the top.
Bake for 50 minutes. Let cool enough to cut, and serve with whipped cream.
* You can use a 9 by 9, just pull it out of the oven earlier.
** If you don’t have butter or can’t eat it, use coconut oil or a neutral oil and just mix with the sugar at this step.
*** Obvs you can use chocolate chips if you don’t have chunks. If you like white chocolate you could go half and half with the semisweet, too.
(c) 2020 Magda Pecsenye. All rights reserved. Make this recipe and pass it along to your friends but keep my name attached.
I made this one up last year, when I spent Thanksgiving with my ex-husband and kids and we ate it while watching The Big Lebowski. (I cannot recommend spending holidays with your ex unless you’ve been divorced for as long as we have and nobody feels creeped out or coerced by it. The kids suggested it and we were so pandemic-fatigued that we were like “whatever.”) So whenever I look at the photo of the cake, I think about The Big Lebowski. I guess this cake really brings the room together.
Interested in parenting as well as cranberry cake? Go down to the bottom right and sign up for my parenting email to read my thoughts about parenting through a pandemic and to the new normal.