Cranberry sauce with a kick!

Cylindrical, good.

A quick search on the internet last night for a fast and easy cranberry sauce recipe to go with Christmas dinner yielded this beauty from the BBC Good Food blog.  A few minutes' preparation and then approximately ten minutes on the hob and presto, lovely cranberry sauce.  If I had known that making cranberry sauce were this easy, I would have done it years ago.  I blame both not having had access to fresh cranberries in my California youth and being a devotee of the canned cranberry 'log' for as long as I can remember for keeping me in the dark about the excellence of real cranberry sauce.  Not having done a proper shop before the stores closed for Christmas, I actually didn't have all the ingredients listed, so had to make do with a bit of improvisation.  What I came up with was oh-so-divine.  I can only imagine how tasty the original recipe must be.

Original ingredients:
250 gr fresh cranberries
100 gr light muscovado sugar
100 ml orange juice

Delightful, de-lovely, delish!

My ingredients:
340 gr fresh cranberries*
100 gr dark muscovado sugar
50 ml mandarin juice
50 ml pomegranite syrup
zest of one lemon

As per the recipe, I tossed the sugar, juice, syrup and zest in a pot and brought to a boil.  Then I added the cranberries, reduced heat, and let simmer for about ten minutes.  The recipe states one should let the cranberries simmer for five minutes, but I was enjoying listening to the cranberries emit a soft 'pop' while I stirred them that I let the time get away from me.  The sauce, really, was no worse for the wear and most of the cranberries had retained their shape and a slight firmness when bitten into.

One would think that my having used 90gr more cranberries than the recipe called for would lead to a less sweet-tasting sauce, but I figured my adding the sugary pomegranate syrup would make up for the lack of sugar.  Not only did it, but the syrup may have lent another layer of flavor to the whole thing--that and the mandarin juice--making it all the tastier! 

*the cranberries came from the USA!