Secret Recipe Club: Orange Poppy Seed Waffles with Cranberry Syrup

This month's Secret Recipe Club recipe comes from the blog Adventures in All Things Food!  This blog is written by a lady named Andrea who has a very busy life with her husband, 3 truly adorable children, and a farm.  She is very talented and covers all kinds of topics on her blog, including, of course, food.  There are lots of great looking recipes on her blog, and I chose Orange Poppy Seed Waffles with Cranberry Syrup.  They seemed like the perfect breakfast for a lazy autumn day!  Other awesome looking recipes include Roasted Red Pepper and Tortellini Soup, and Chocolate Chip Malt Cookies.

The waffles and syrup both turned out great.  My only change was to add the juice of half a navel orange to the waffle batter instead of just 1 tablespoon.  This is the only time I can remember making waffles good and flavorful enough to eat without syrup or toppings of any sort!  They're delicious and the orange flavor comes through nicely.  I love poppy seeds so would probably double the amount next time.  In the future I will also experiment with making the batter into pancakes because the waffles turned out very fluffy and I think would do nicely as pancakes.

We loved the syrup, too, and it was perfect exactly as written.  Mine didn't have the beautiful jewel tone of Andrea's- you should have seen the color of the cranberries after cooking for 10 hours!- but it tasted great.  The orange flavor in the syrup is subtle and easy to miss, but it's still wonderful.  Usually I have a strong preference for regular maple syrup on waffles and pancakes, but I really enjoyed this cranberry syrup and didn't put normal syrup on mine at all.  A first!  In the future, I will experiment with cooking the syrup entirely on the stove so it will have a prettier color, but that's minor.  The recipe also made a lot more syrup than needed for the single batch of waffles, so I'm going to try it with plain pancakes as well.

All in all, a great breakfast treat that really tasted (and smelled!) like autumn/winter!  This would make a great Thanksgiving or Christmas breakfast.  Thank you for the great recipes, Andrea!  These waffles will definitely be on my table again!

Cranberry Syrup

1 1/2 C fresh cranberries, rinsed
1 C sugar
2 C water
zest of one large orange
2 Tbsp cornstarch

In a slow cooker, stir together all ingredients except cornstarch.  Cook overnight, 8-10 hours.  Strain liquid through a fine meshed sieve into a medium pan and press the berries against the sieve with a spoon to extract as much juice as possible.  Discard cranberries.

Bring the liquid to a boil.  While you wait for it to boil, stir together 1/4 C cold water and the 2 Tbsp cornstarch.  Use one hand to stir boiling liquid while you pour the cornstarch slurry in a small stream.  Continue to simmer until syrup thickens, then cook for another minute or two.  Remove pan from heat, pour into a small pitcher (you can let it cool a bit in the pan first if you're worried the pitcher will shatter), and set aside while you prepare the waffles.

Yield: About 3 cups

Orange Poppy Seed Waffles

1 3/4 C flour
3 Tbsp sugar
2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt
1 Tbsp poppy seeds (do 2 if you love poppy seeds like I do)
3 large eggs
1 1/2 C buttermilk
zest of one large orange
juice of 1/2 of a large orange
1 stick salted butter, melted

Whisk together dry ingredients in a large bowl.  In a medium bowl, whisk eggs until smooth.  Whisk in buttermilk, zest, and orange juice.  Pour into the dry ingredients and stir until well combined.  Stir in melted butter.  Let batter rest for 20 minutes.

While the batter rests, preheat and grease your waffle iron.  Cook waffles according to manufacturer's instructions.  Place an oven safe plate in your oven set to warm and add the finished waffles as they cook.  Serve waffles with butter and the cranberry orange syrup.

Yield:  This recipe made 4 large waffles on my Black & Decker iron, which makes for 4 servings.  How many waffles it makes will depend on your waffle iron.

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