[IMAGE] With so many berries and stone fruits in season at the end of summer, it’s tempting to simply eat them by the handful... after handful... after handful. But if you’re looking to bake them into a little something special, a flognarde is absolutely the answer. This French custardy dessert is simple to make and really lets the flavour of its star ingredient shine through — your favourite fruit. Which you choose is up to you — Dorie Greenspan shares a handful of variations in her cookbook Everyday Dorie. Get ready to experiment now and well beyond summer. And if you're wondering if this is a clafoutis, Dorie has some thoughts for you below... Flognarde with Plums or Berries or Pears By Dorie Greenspan A flognarde (flow-nyard) is a custardy French dessert of fruit — plums, prunes, pears or berries — baked in a batter that most resembles the mix you’d use to make crepes. No matter what fruit  you use, you’ll enjoy the way it softens and sweetens as it bakes for almost an hour. Tender fruits, like plums and berries, become almost jammy in the oven, the perfect consistency for the cake, which is soft and custardy — almost like a chubby pancake. Because the cake is purposefully plain, it’s important that you flavor it with good vanilla extract and, more traditionally, alcohol. If the flognarde tips toward boozy, many will declare it a success. (If you’d rather not use alcohol, up the extract a bit.)   A flognarde is a flognarde is a flognarde… unless it has cherries, in which case it’s a clafoutis (cla-foo-tee). That’s a specialty of the Limousin region, and according to local custom, the  cherries should be baked whole and unpitted, so that they remain juicy — and dangerous to the  unsuspecting: Warn everyone at the table. (The clafoutis in the photo in the book is made with frozen pitted cherries.)