Bilberries and wild raspberries were the stuff of my childhood. We'd go picking every summer in the forests around our summer house and get as much as we could. Mum would then freeze them and use in baking and for desserts throughout the winter months.

My sister was particularly good at foraging and one summer I think the rest of us had given up so Dad was paying her by the litre and she earned enough money to buy herself a straw hat. Yes, that really was the one thing she wanted more than anything else. It was a nice orange straw hat with a ribbon and flowers on it. No, it wasn't the 1800s and we weren't in a Jane Austen novel. Pray.

I was pretty crap and my aracnofobia didn't help. I had to first carefully brush the blueberry shrubs clean from spider webs and a few times I actually returned to the cabin in tears because there were too many spiders. Nowadays I am much braver and hardly cry at all. I still don't like spiders but I can handle the reasonable sized Finnish ones having had to deal with the much bigger English bastards.

In Scandinavia we have this thing called Queen Jam or Queen's Jam. Some online resources say it's originally a Swedish invention, but my objective view is that it's Finnish. Swedes just like to claim everything. Like Santa and Sauna. It's ridiculous.

Queen Jam is a jam made of wild raspberries and bilberries, half and half, and with sugar of course. Some people might throw in some strawberries as well and I'm not gonna judge them. I have never been able to find bilberries in the shops here, but I'm sure some farmers markets must sell them. I used shop bought blueberries and some frozen raspberries I had leftover in the freezer for this tart.

But you could use other left over fruit or berries - I could see peach and blueberries work nicely together, Or even apples and pears or cherries, whatever's dying in your fruit basket.

For the creme fraiche topping you can use natural or greek yoghurt as well, or a combination of creme fraiche and yoghurt, whatever you happen to have in your fridge.

For the base you can make any sweet tart base, I use this one with oats, it has lovely taste and texture, almost like a crumble and oats is good for cholesterol!

Recipe: Blueberry and raspberry Queen tart

Pie crust:
125 g butter or margarine
1/3 cup sugar
1 egg
1/4 cup plain flour
½ tsp baking powder
1.5 cups oats

Topping:
1.5 cups of any berries or chopped fruit
Cream mix:
3/4 cup creme fraiche (or combination of cream, yoghurt and creme fraiche, even quark)
1/4 cup sugar (or slightly more or less depending on how tart your fruit or berries are)
1 egg
2 tsp vanilla paste or extract

Preheat your oven to 175C.

Mix the room temperature butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Mix in the egg. In a separate bowl mix the flour, baking powder and oats. Fold the dry ingredients into the butter mix. Butter a round tart dish and spread the mix into the bottom and sides of the dish.

Tip the berries or fruit on top of the tart base. mix together all the ingredients of the topping and pour it on top.

Bake for about 35 minutes until the sides are starting to brown a little and the topping has set.

Serve as it is warm or cold, or with vanilla ice-cream or warm or cold custard.



Linking to Fuss Free Flavours and Fabfood4all