Gooseberry crumble

When I was a child, there were no fruits I loved more than the gooseberries from my grandmother’s garden. While my sister would go and pick the sweet raspberries, I would eat myself sick on the not-so-sweet gooseberries. Don’t forget, I wasn’t mad keen in sweet stuff when I was younger. Apart from granny’s garden, there weren’t many places where you could get gooseberries. You would occasionally be lucky enough to find them on some farmer’s markets, but not in huge amounts.
So when I first visited the UK I was all excited about finding tinned gooseberries on the supermarket shelves. I am even more excited now to see that they've started selling fresh gooseberries.
I decided the give the classic gooseberry crumble a shot. My crumbles are usually just ok, but either the crumble gets to soggy or to hard… not much crumbliness going on. So no more sticking to a recipe but just following my intuition. I just mixed and crumbled the ingredients together until it looked ok. And it was. It was more than ok, it was the best crumble I have ever made. Actually, the best crumble I have ever had! Gooseberry crumble, for 2
: 350-400g fresh gooseberries
: 40g butter
: caster sugar
: Demerara sugar
: flour
: ground almonds

Simmer the gooseberries with 2-3 tbsp caster sugar until soft. In the meantime, mix together the butter, Demerara sugar and flour and almonds (ratio 2:1) until you get a crumbly texture.
Start off adding 2 tbsp Demerara sugar, 2 tbsp flour and 1 tbsp ground almonds. Taste the mixture and add more sugar until sweet enough. Finally add more flour and almonds until you get the right, crumbly texture. Make sure the crumble is rather fine and you don’t have lumps of dough in your mixture.
Spoon the gooseberry compote into a small, ovenproof dish. Top with the crumble and finally sprinkle with one tbsp Demerara sugar. Bake at 180 degrees for around 30 minutes.
Pour over some cold single or double cream and serve immediately.