Hacking Canned Cranberry Sauce

I'd love to make my own cranberry sauce - maybe a cranberry chutney - for Thanksgiving, but my mother insists that we have canned cranberry sauce. This isn't unusual, apparently.

Personally, I'm not a huge fan of the stuff, though it can have its uses in moderation. Given the chance, I'd alter it - add some real cranberries, orange zest, and things like that, but she'd object.

I began to wonder whether there was anything I could do to make it more interesting.

I suppose, I though, I could get rid of the stupid can shape.

Cranberry sauce melts, but not easily. Don't use a frying pan. Use a double boiler (or a ceramic bowl in a pot of water), and mix the stuff up with a spoon.

Once you have it melted, you can reshape it in a mold. Freezing it in the mold helps. Additional pectin would probably help, too. Still, with a silicone mold that Angela made (for soap - we cleaned it out), we were able to cast cranberry sauce and get some pretty good detail:

This does give off a small amount of liquid. I suspect additional pectin (or another hydrocolloid) would help there too.

I didn't have any cookie cutters around, but I though that they might work well to create cute single-servings of cranberry sauce.