Flapjack Crumble with the last of the gooseberries

Battling biting little thorns, I collected the last of the gooseberries hiding under bushy green leaves.They are little devils to collect.  There weren't quite enough to make a dessert but along with windfall mulberries and small yellow cherry plums made a delicious base for my favourite flapjack crumble.

I've just  rooted out the original recipe to check that I'm writing down the correct ingredients.  I discovered that it's actually called Flapjack Plum Pudding and not crumble!  Whatever you call it, it's delicious and so easy to make that since making the first one  five or six years ago I've never made a conventional crumble again.This is a great gluten free recipe.
  

Flapjack Plum Pudding

Ingredients:
•               750g stoned ripe plum

•               75g(3oz)  butter

•               75g organic jumbo oats (I prefer this made with finer oat)

•               75g light Muscovado sugar

Method:

1.             Halve and stone the ripe plums and spread them in the bottom of a buttered ovenproof dish.

2.           Melt the butter in a saucepan and mix with the oats and sugar.

3.           Sprinkle over the plums and bake in a preheated oven, 180c/gas mark 4 for 35 - 40 minutes, until the fruit is tender.

4.           Serve with warm custard or pouring cream.

Simple...

In my slightly altered version, I cook the fruit for a little while in a saucepan.  Depending on the ripeness and type of fruit I add a little brown sugar or honey to taste. Then cook the fruit for a  while until it begins to fall, but not break up.  I then transfer it to an oven proof dish and  top with the flapjack mixture, which I usually put a little vanilla extract in.  This  method cuts down on the baking time by about ten or fifteen minutes.

I make this a lot after  Christmas  when the green grocers shelves are full of cranberries, often reduced radically.  The combination of windfall apples and sour cranberries is amazing...

It's sad we're coming to the end of our little berry crop but it looks like we're going to have a lot of apples this autumn and I think I spotted what looks like a damson tree in the woods peeping over the top of our fence...and it's full of fruit...I think I'll go and investigate...