Flogging My Cockaigne

I'd blame Rabbitch for the title of this post, since we all know what a shameless trollop she is, but I will confess to having thought of it myself. I'm sure she's corrupted my innocent little mind, though, so I'm gonna blame her anyway. And see what sort of google searches hit this post.

Okay, I promised a recipe, so I guess I'd better deliver.


CRANBERRY-ORANGE COCKAIGNE

Preheat oven to 400ºF/204ºC

Sift together:

- 1 cup all-purpose flour
- 1 teaspoon double-acting baking powder
- ¼ teaspoon salt
- 2 tablespoons sugar

Into this mixture, cut in 2-3 tablespoons of plain unsalted butter. In a measuring cup, beat one egg, ½ teaspoon vanilla, & enough plain yogurt to make ½ cup (about 120cc). Add this to the flour mixture and mix to make a stiff dough. Spread out on the bottom of a well-greased 10" (25cm) pan, mounding up slightly around the outside to hold the filling.

To make the filling, squeeze the pulp out of three clementine oranges (a puree of a small can of mandarain oranges would likely be a reasonable substitute out of season). To this, add one cup of sugar and 1½ to 2 cups of fresh cranberries. Boil these down until all the cranberries have popped and spoon the solid(er) portion into the center of the dough (The remaining syrup can be used later for pancakes or some other bit of yumminess). Pop the pan into the preheated oven for 20-25 minutes and allow it to cool a little before cutting and serving.

I only got to taste an earlier, slightly overcooked version of this recipe, but the one I showed in the last post was a huge success. Visiting friend Don said he wanted me to make it for him every day.

Tannenbaum

Speaking of Don, he went with us to pick out our holiday tree the other night and snapped this pic of David & myself with his cell phone.



We ultimately settled on a little potted balsam fir, so that we can plant it when the ground thaws and so we'd have a very heavy base that the cats can't knock over. Since we didn't really trust Cougar not to attack it, we left off all breakable ornaments. It makes for a fairly sparsely decorated tree, but I think it's homely in the best sense of the word.



Except, perhaps, for the creepy, disembodied, demented Santa head ornament.



It doesn't show too well in this, but the thing has these bizarre sideways-glancing pale blue eyes. In a way, the grotesqueness of it is the most compelling reason to put it on the tree. Or maybe that's just the demon voices talking.