Cranberry Nut Bread and Cranberry Cookies

Cranberries come out of the closet (or pantry, I guess) more often at this time of year and seeing them on sale at my grocery store sparked a bit of the domestic in me.  I don't even like cranberry sauce and think whole cranberries are way too tart to eat as is - but what about cranberry nut bread?

I have a great banana nut bread recipe and thought I'd substitute fresh chopped cranberries for the banana and see what happens.  Since mashed banana is a lot more liquid than the berries would be, I used less milk until I got the consistency that I thought it should be.  I also added a bit more sugar, since bananas are naturally sweet where cranberries are tart.

Orange and cranberry works well together, so I tossed in a bit of orange peel too.  Not sure if it made much difference, but I know it's in there even if you can't taste it.

Here's what I came up with for the cranberry nut bread.

I had cranberries left and decided to give cookies a try.  I thought cranberry cookies might be a nice change from chocolate chip, so back to the kitchen I went to see what I could come up with.  I didn't think the brown sugar from the traditional toll house cookie would work so well with cranberries, so while I did use some, I used more white sugar.  A few other tweaks and voila ... Cranberry Nut Cookies.

By the time I got to the end of my debut batch (yes, I've eaten every one of them), I felt that I may have overcompensated a bit with the sugar to offset the tart cranberries.  The cookie itself is a bit sweet, and I wasn't going for a sugar cookie.  I think I'll decrease the sugar just a bit on the next batch and see how that works.

Enjoy ...