Cranberry Pear Gelatin Mold

Every year for Thanksgiving I make spiced cranberry sauce to go with turkey. This time I wanted to try something different without the usual spices and found a recipe for Jello molded salad. I like it and I'll probably make both sauce and gelatin mold for this year's Thanksgiving Day dinner. 

The original recipe uses bottled cranberry juice. I made my own sweetened juice with fresh cranberries, sugar, mandarin orange peels, and a chopped teeny tiny Seckel pear.  

Cranberry Pear Gelatin Mold

1 pound fresh cranberries

4 cups water

1¼ cups sugar, or to taste

1 small pear, peeled, cored, and finely chopped

peel of 1 mandarin orange, white pith scraped

1 cup mandarin orange juice

2 envelopes unflavored gelatin 

1 small pear, peeled, cored, and thinly sliced lengthwise

1 cup chilled dried cranberries
2 tablespoons chilled chopped pecans, optional

• Wash and drain cranberries. Place in a medium saucepan together with water, sugar, pear, and orange peel. Bring to a boil over high heat. Turn heat down to low and simmer, uncovered, for 20 minutes. Cover and let sit for 2 hours. 
• Strain into a measuring cup; discard solids. 
• Put half of the juice back into the saucepan and reheat to just boiling. 
• Stir in orange juice into the remaining cranberry juice and sprinkle gelatin. Leave for 5 minutes for gelatin to soften. Pour boiling juice into gelatin mixture, stirring until gelatin is completely dissolved.
• Line an 8 inch loaf pan with plastic film and place sliced pears to cover the bottom of the pan, or brush pan with a little water if you want smooth surface. Pour a little gelatin mixture to cover the sliced fruit; leave in the refrigerator to set. Chill juice in refrigerator until it has the consistency of egg whites.
• Stir in chilled dried cranberries, and pecans, if using, into the juice mixture and pour into the pan. Cover with plastic wrap and let set overnight in the refrigerator.