Summer Berry Fruit Tart: Sweeter Than Sunshine!

1. For Crust: Oven should be preheated to 350 degrees before beginning. Then, place cookies in blender, one half of a bag at a time. Do not eat any of them no matter how much you want to do so. You need all of the cookies. Grind cookies into crumbs and then pour into a bowl. The cookie crumbs are heavy, but they should measure over 2 cups of crumbs. (The original recipe calls for 2 2/3 cups of crumbs, but I didn’t have that much. It still works.)

2. To the cookie crumb mixture, add 1/4 cup of powdered sugar. (Lavender flavored powdered sugar would be even better. Stormy Stewart has a lavender shortbread recipe that tells how to make lavender sugar.) Then add 1/3 cup of very soft butter and mix well. I softened the butter in my glass pie plate (since I didn’t have a tart pan). After pouring butter out of pie plate, I rubbed butter over pie plate to butter it well. (The crust removed easily when the tart was cut. The crust also holds together when serving much better than a store-bought shortbread crust.) Finally, add the 1/2 teaspoon of extract. Mix together well, and then pour into greased pie plate (10-inch) and press into the bottom and sides of the plate. (I used my fingers.) Bake in preheated oven 10-14 minutes until lightly browned on edges. Cool crust completely before adding filling.

3. Note: The original Southern Living testing team used 2 2/3 cups of Pepperidge Farm Chessman Cookies (about 1 1/2 pkgs.) and 1/2 teaspoon of almond extract rather than vanilla extract. They also made 6 6-inch tarts instead of a large one(in case you want to make this according to the original recipe).