Raw Berry Tart with a Coconut Pastry Cream (vegan, gluten-free)

I have something for you, just in time for 4th of July celebrations.....and no cooking required! I used to think that making tarts was a complicated process, but it is really quite simple. You will need a 9 or 10-inch tart pan with a removable bottom, which can be found on amazon.com or your local kitchen store. For this recipe I use my standard nut-date crust which is pressed into the pan. Then the filling is added and topped with whatever berries or fresh fruit you have on hand. Raw tarts come together so quickly!

For the pastry cream, I use coconut butter, which is made from both the oil and the meat. We like the brand Artisana, but you can use others. Sometimes it is labeled with different names such as coconut mana or coconut cream concentrate, but it is all the same thing.

How to Make Honey-Sweetened Jam

Homemade jam is usually so full of sugar, but it doesn't have to be! Using Pomona's Pectin, one can make a low-sugar, honey-sweetened, or fruit juice-sweetened homemade jam. This particular pectin comes from citrus peel. The jelling is activated by calcium water (mono calcium phosphate) which comes with the pectin. It is so easy to make jam from all of your freshly picked fruit of the season. Making and canning jam is one of the great ways to preserve the harvest!

Last year I experimented quite a bit with some of the hundreds of pounds of fruit we harvested. I made an awesome Vanilla-Plum Jam sweetened with coconut sugar, a Honey-Sweetened Blueberry Jam, Spiced Peach Jam made without pectin and with sugar, Blueberry-Lemon Jam made with a small amount of pureed unripe, immature apples as the pectin source (unripe apples are high in pectin), a tart Italian Plum-Agave Jam, and Cherry-Peach Jam sweetened with grape juice concentrate. Let me tell you, homemade jam makes for many wonderful Christmas gifts!

Gluten-Free Maple Raspberry Scone Recipe (vegan)

We've been very busy around here lately. Berry season is in full swing and that means it's picking time! Yesterday evening I took the kids out by myself to pick berries. Raspberries and blueberries. There is a small, family-run organic farm not too far away from us that offers u-pick organic berries. We go every year.

My 18 month old twins jumped out of the car last night and ran over to the raspberry bushes exclaiming, "wow, wowa, wow, wowa"!!! They began picking and gorging on the big, luscious berries immediately! And for the first time ever, filled their buckets with a few berries. We ended up picking 27.5 pounds of berries! I have to say that my girls are a big help and picked quite a bit themselves!

The photo above is of one of my twins taken a few weeks ago. It was our first berry picking adventure of the season and as you can see, many of the berries were not ready yet. This is why they were so excited last night!

This morning I made a raspberry scone recipe that I thought I would share. I made it the other day with chopped fresh cherries and almonds but I like them much better with the tart and tangy raspberries.

I have a cooking class tonight (7/16) at the Bellingham Food Co-op. For those of you that are local I think there still may be a few spots left. It is a yummy dessert class full of gluten-free, dairy-free, egg-free, soy-free, sugar-free desserts! Certainly not taste-free though! :)