Raspberry Brambles

Last month, my husband came home with two dozen raspberry-filled little tarts, a gift from a client.  Two dozen.  For our family of five.

We pretty much polished off the first dozen in one sitting.  In between our exclamations of "these are so good!" and "I have to have another," one of my daughters asked, "What do you call these?"  My husband answered, "I can't remember the name...we used to get these from the bakery when I was a kid."

As soon as he said those words I had an AHA! moment.  My friend, Gayle, has been singing the praises of raspberry-filled brambles served with tea during her childhood visits with her grandmother.  Hmmm, could these little treats be what she's been talking about?

So I asked my husband, "Do you think these are called brambles?" Yep, that's what they are.  And I just HAD to figure out how to make them.

All of these pictures were taken one week ago during my first attempt to make these brambles!  

I've made them twice since then, tweaking as I go along: 

•  I've decided that frozen raspberries make a better filling than fresh berries--they cook faster when you're making the filling (and cooking fresh raspberries just seems a waste, doesn't it?). 
•  I've also tried making them with ready-made pie crust (from the supermarket dairy case)...in a word, yuck.  
• I tried ready-made puff pastry (from the supermarket freezer), it tasted fine but puffed up worse than frizzy hair on a humid day.
• I'm still trying to figure out a way to totally prevent the filling from leaking.  I tried poking a hole in the top crust, figuring it would let steam out, but those are the ones that really leaked!  Any suggestions?

This recipe needs prep ahead of time--the filling needs to be refrigerated to firm up, and I've decided that it's easiest to just prepare it the day before and let it sit in the fridge overnight.  

For those of you who may be thinking to yourselves that there could be too much effort to this recipe and it's not worth spending two days to make a few cookies:  I promise you, making the filling is very quick.  Throw it together, put it in the fridge and forget about it until the next day (which is when you'll make the crust;  unfortunately, the crust is not so quick to prepare.  But I promise you it's worth it).

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