Cranberry Brownies

You know how sometimes you go to the trouble of making cranberry sauce for Thanksgiving, and it's totally delicious but you have a bunch left over, and it sits around in a Tupperware container for quite a while, and every time you open the refrigerator you look at it and think: "crap, how are we ever going to use up that cranberry sauce? I mean, we're vegetarians, so it's not like we're making a lot of leftover-turkey-and-cranberry-sauce sandwiches up in here or anything." You know how that happens?

Yeah. I hate that too.

And I'm here to rescue you. With cranberry sauce brownies.



They are fantastic. Fudgy, chewy, and tart--a lot like eating chocolate covered cherries, but you get to feel virtuous as you eat them, because you, you frugal and resourceful thing you, have repurposed your cranberry sauce. Upcycled it, one might even say.

The recipe is from The Ultimate Brownie Book, by Bruce Weinstein. I've never heard of the book before but Larry Page and Sergey Brin recommended the recipe and I have to say they did not lead me astray in this case. It calls for a full 16 oz. of cranberry sauce, not like 1/4 or 1/3 of a cup like those other b.s. recipes out there.

And the cranberry sauce that was so good I didn't want it to go to waste is Stephanie Dietz's Fresh Cranberry Bourbon Sauce via Design*Sponge. Simple and classic, with bonus points for bourbon.