Burns Night recipe : Cranachan with a fruity twist

Burns Night, celebrating the birthday of the Scottish poet, is on 25th January and in honour of the occasion, Jordan's sent us through a recipe for their take on the traditional dessert, Cranachan. Proper cranachan is a mixture of whipped cream, whisky, honey, fresh raspberries and toasted oatmeal soaked in a little whisky. Here's Jordan's version, using their Country Crisp with Raspberries.

Ingredients

100g (4oz) Jordans Country Crisp Raspberries

300g (10oz) Raspberries (thawed if frozen)

300ml (1/2 pint) Fresh double cream

2 Tablespoons Whisky (optional)

Mint leaves to decorate

Method

Lightly crush the raspberries with a fork. Reserve half of them, and then share the rest between 4 attractive serving glasses.

Whip the cream in a large chilled bowl until it holds its shape, then fold in the whisky (if using) and remaining raspberries. Add the Jordans Country Crisp and fold in gently.

Spoon into the glasses and chill until ready to serve, then decorate with the mint leaves.

The recipe stated that you could make a more saintly version by replacing the cream with Greek yogurt and omitting the whisky. Well, I promised the Madhouse mini-chefs that we'd make some this weekend but I couldn't find raspberries anyway, neither at the farmers' market nor the supermarket, plus Madhouse Daddy forgot the Greek yogurt when he went shopping. Never fear - we tweaked the tweaked version even more and came up with this dessert, which may no longer resemble Cranachan but which tasted fab !

First, find a small boy and a box of Jordan's Country Crisp. Give him a bowl and a spoon.

Pour some into the bowl then give him a pot of yogurt - we used black cherry but I'm sure anything would do ! -and tell him to mix it all in. If you're lucky, just as much will end up in the bowl as in his mouth !

Various little fingers arrived at this point and started pinching bits out of the bowl while I was chopping up the fruit, murmuring appreciatively, so you could just stop there ! In the absence of raspberries, I asked the Madhouse mini-chefs to choose something from the fruit bowl and they chose an orange.

We layered the chopped orange segments and the yogurt-coated Country Crisp in little individual ramekins. I then squirted some whipped cream into the same bowl that had had the yogurt mixture in and sprinkled over a bit more Country Crisp. Pierre very gently mixed this in.

We heaped the whipped cream on top of the yogurt mixture and picked a few pieces of dried strawberries out of the Country Crisp to put on top to make it look pretty.

Instant dessert - the whole thing took 5 minutes to prepare - and it was met with just one complaint : there wasn't enough ! As this uses nothing but store cupboard basics (we happened to have a can of squirty cream kicking about in the fridge after Christmas), we'll definitely be making this again. Apologies to anyone Scottish who is shaking their head thinking that our version has nothing at all to do with Cranachan !

Disclosure : We received a box of Raspberry Country Crisp in order to try out the recipe. As you can see from the pictures, the Madhouse Mini-chefs ignored the new box and used the Strawberry Country Crisp that was already in the cupboard !

Linking up to the Scottish recipe roundup at Cooking Around The World

Other blogposts you may be interested in :

Recipe : Black Cherry Crisp

What to do with a crateload of strawberries?

Haggis recipe #3 : Veggie haggis with baked onions & tomatoes