What to do with leftover cranberry sauce

Hooray for Thanksgiving leftovers! But some of them are easier to use than others. We talked about what to do with leftover mashed potatoes yesterday, so let's tackle a tougher one today: leftover cranberry sauce. (I hope you made it from scratch! It's so much more delicious.)

There are a lot of recipes for using leftover cranberry sauce. But my #1 favorite thing to do with cranberry sauce is use it as an ice cream topping. Get some high-quality French vanilla ice cream and add a few spoonfuls of cranberry sauce. So good! (And cranberries are healthy, so this is basically a superfood.)

Cranberry sauce does surprisingly well with dairy. It is an excellent topping for Brie cheese. Bake it in the oven to heat it up, and serve it with some good crackers. And a few spoonfuls make a good addition to your daily smoothie or cup of yogurt.

Not to mention cranberry sauce and cream cheese! You can mix cranberry sauce into soft cream cheese to make a delicious topping. Or make my favorite Thanksgiving leftover variant: sliced turkey on a bagel with cream cheese and cranberry sauce.

Leftover cranberry sauce is a great addition to baked goods. You can add a swirl of it to a pan of coffee cake, dollops of it to muffins, use it in thumbprint cookies in place of jam, and even mix it into bread dough to make cranberry bread. The tartness goes well with sweet baked goods, and the liquid nature of the sauce helps keep things moist.

And finally, if you don't want to bake it into baked goods, cranberry sauce makes an excellent topping or glaze. Just drizzle some over the top of pound cake, coffee cake, muffins, brownies, and more. Yum!

Image courtesy Flickr/bdu