Gooseberry crumble

I've been making the most of the weather and have been spending as much time outdoors in the garden as possible. It's so lovely to see everything in bloom and it's the time of year when all of the months of hard work and tending to teeny-tiny seedlings pays off and there seems to be pure abundance.

This year, I managed to get to the gooseberries before the birds did and after weeks of watching as the gooseberries turned from pale green to a luscious deep purple, the day came when I finally decided to take on the gooseberry bush - and I won!...Well, I escaped with just some slight thorny scrapes. And here are the spoils:

It's hard to see how many gooseberries I actually got but there were almost 1kg, not bad for a fairly small, two year old gooseberry bush. So I decided to make a batch of crumbles. The recipe below is adapted from this one that I found here on the BBC Good Food website.

Ingredients:
800g gooseberries
125g sugar for the gooseberries and 120g for the crumble topping
150g plain flour
100g oats
125g butter

Method (pretty much the same as the Good Food one):

1. Preheat the oven to 180C. Top and tail the gooseberries and mix with 125g of sugar. Separate into individual dishes or one large one if you fancy a feast! Then sprinkle 3 tbsp of water over them.

2. Add the flour, butter and oats into a bowl and rub together to form 'breadcrumbs', then stir in the rest of the sugar.

3. Spoon the crumble mixture over the gooseberries and pop into the oven for about 45 minutes. If you've made a batch like I did then you can either put them straight into the freezer ready to defrost and cook at a later date or gift them to friends and family - mine were delighted and I got and apple and blackcurrant crumble in return.

As you can see, I got three small-ish crumbles from my pickings, plus a large one and there are still a few gooseberries ripening on the bush so hopefully I'll be able to make some more.

Incidentally, I thought I'd purchased an 'Invicta' and was surprised when they turned purple, so I suppose the identity of my gooseberry plant will remain a mystery.  Oh and I wont pretend that this song wasn't buzzing around my brain while I was busy baking....Everybody's good at cooking something...