Cranberry Parfait

A cranberry parfait (with graham cracker crust!) is a perfect Christmas or New Year’s party dessert. Made as shooters, served with tiny spoons, or in a cute, footed trifle bowl where everyone takes as much as they want, your guests and family are sure to love them. We made them in our dessert cups which allows our guests a delightful taste, but doesn’t overwhelm the coming breakfast entree!

Where’s the recipe?

Before I get to the recipe (I know, I know, stop talking and just give us the goods!) I have to explain WHY it is that whenever you just want the blogger to shut up and give you the details, you find they ramble on for days about how this recipe was handed down through generations of pioneers, pirates, pilgrims, etc. (They also insert dozens of photos you don’t want to see, either.)

Anyway, why they do it - in the land of online searching, they need to have at least 300 words in the text part of the recipe (this section where I’m aimlessly nattering on) so that the recipe is deemed ‘valuable’ and may appear in a search conducted by you, fair reader. I don’t get paid if you find this recipe (unless you love it so much you decide to stay here), but the bloggers DO get paid if you click any of the links in their recipe.

So, that’s why you have to wade through pages and pages before you get the goods. (If you want to stay with us, by the way, there is a link at the bottom of the recipe and at the top of the page. We’d love to see you!)

Looking for something else? Check here for all of our breakfast recipes.

While the cranberries were cooking down, I assembled the cups with the graham cracker crust. For some unknown reason, I actually have one of those pastry tampers, so I put it to good use on this. The graham cracker crust is made with an entire sleeve of crackers and about 3 tbsps of butter. I pulsed the whole thing in a small food processor (Rock offered to smash the graham crackers with a hammer, but this worked out ok) and then scooped it out by the spoonful into the dessert cups. Tamp it down evenly, put it in the fridge to harden up, and it’s all ready for when the cranberry filling is done.

Helpful tip!

(The recipe I started with said to just crumble the crackers into the cups and top with the cranberry sauce. Take my word for it that throwing in that little bit of butter improved the graham crackers 100%! Apologies to the folks who had it first. The following weekend it was remarkably better.)

Cranberry filling after cooking it with orange juice and sugar. Run it through with an immersion blender to completely break it down. Now it needs to ‘rest’ for a bit, then into the fridge to set up. You want it cooled down enough that it doesn’t make the graham cracker crust soggy. The consistency is that of a thick milk shake.

This is almost finished. If you are serving these right away, you’ll top them with whipped cream and a sprinkle of crushed graham crackers. You could also do nuts for the sprinkle. We put this in the fridge to set up overnight. It’s nicely chilled that way. And, the whipped cream doesn’t melt as quickly if the cranberry filling is chilled.

Your cranberry parfait is almost ready to assemble!