Double Chocolate Chip Cranberry Bread: A Thanksgiving Morning Treat

One of the reasons that the baking sisters started this blog was to stay connected when I moved across the country.  However far I get away from NYC, my heart is always there and I am heart broken to watch what is going on in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy.  Please consider making a donation to the Red Cross, Bend the Arc or the Educational Alliance (they do lots of fabulous work on the lower east side, both to address immediate needs and find long term solutions to poverty). 

One of the best things about New York City is the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade and one of our family Thanksgiving traditions is to go to the parade (outside, not watching on TV or in someone's apartment like wimps) and then go home, frozen, and eat hot chocolate and chocolate chip cookies.  As we got older, we were less interested in going to the parade, but the hot chocolate and cookie tradition remained.  This year, we are taking my son to the parade for the first time, and we will undoubtably need that hot chocolate and cookies afterwards.

However, if you are not as wedded to this particular tradition, this cake would make an excellent Thanksgiving morning treat.  The tart cranberries are seasonally appropriate, and they offset the sweetness of the cake nicely.  You can make it ahead and it freezes nicely, so you don't have to add it to your list of things to make on Thanksgiving day.  Also, this is technically called "bread" so you can eat it for breakfast.  You can find the recipe here on the Baking Bites blog.

Cranberry Chocolate Chip Muffins

I have been getting really into my iphone camera lately, especially all the cool things you can do with effects.  This photo was taken with the Vintage Camera app, which I love.  It is just fun to change your photos a little bit and I wanted to see how it would do with food.  I really like the way these muffins came out. I think you can see all the parts of the topping, cranberries and chocolate chips.  What are some other cool iphone camera apps that you would recommend?

Anyway, on to the important part...the muffins.  I have had these marked in my reader for a while and I never got around to making them.  However, since Passover has been over, I really wanted muffins and these seemed like a good choice.  And they were!  They had a fantastic combination of a delicious batter, tart cranberry, crunchy topping and sweet chocolate.  These are good special occasion muffins, but since they are pretty easy, you could whip up a batch any time.  I have been sitting with a bag of cranberries in my freezer since Thanksgiving, so these were a great way to use some of them up.

The only difficult part about them was that the strussel topping made the muffins stick to the pan around the edges, so they were a challenge to get out, especially when hot.  I would recommend being really careful not to overfill these so that you get maximum topping without messing up your muffins.  Although the recipe says it makes 15 muffins, I got more like 19 and I think I filled them too full, so you could probably get more.  The recipe is here, on the Baking Bites website.