Have you ever seen and/or eaten a wineberry?  I hadn't before this week.  I saw them at the Dupont Circle farmers market Sunday and couldn't resist buying some.  You know me and my compulsion to try new foods.  The wineberry is a close relative of the raspberry; both are members of the genus Rubus. They're native to China, Japan and Korea but have invaded the northeastern part of the U.S., having been introduced through Europe during the nineteenth century.  Apparently they can be found on roadsides and in the wild throughout the northeastern U.S., but I've never gone looking for them.  Their taste seems a bit more tart and flavorful than raspberries—delicious.

I decided to make small tarts with them.  I was feeling lazy and didn't want to make pastry dough, so I threw together a made-up graham cracker crust . . . one sleeve of cinnamon graham crackers, pulsed in a food processor and combined with 6 tablespoons of melted butter.  My made-up crust was ok, but if you want to make a tart with a graham cracker crust, I'd recommend you use a more tried and tested graham cracker crust recipe like this one.  Mine was super easy and tasted fine, but it sort of fell apart and could have used a touch of sugar.

I filled my tart crusts with a pastry cream I made using a recipe in the Williams-Sonoma Dessert book, which, as I think I've mentioned before, completely rockz.  (Thanks for the gift, Meg!)  There are a bazillion pastry cream recipes out there, like this one, but the one in the Williams-Sonoma Dessert book differs from many of them in that it entails folding whipped heavy cream into the pastry cream as the final step.  The addition of whipped cream rockets standard pastry cream into the stratosphere of decadence.  If you're using a pastry cream recipe that doesn't involve folding in whipped cream, I recommend you try it anyway.  How can you go wrong?

I skipped the fairly standard step of glazing the fruit tart, mainly because I'm new to wineberries and wanted to feature them in all of their unadulterated glory, but also because, again, I was feeling a bit lazy.

Despite the minor shortcomings of the crust, these tarts were delicious.  Food experiments don't need to turn out perfectly in order to be delicious.  The simple fact was that I wanted/needed to take some shortcuts—it was either that or not making the tarts.  That's just the kind of mood I was in.  And I'm really, really glad I made the tarts.

So, what are you doing with all the fresh summer berries at market right now?