Another plum recipe! Plums are definitely one of my new favourite fruits – up there with rhubarb, strawberries and raspberries. They are not really one thing in particular, but a fruit full of contradictions:With all three there is something about their glorious pink/red/purple colours, their soft-yet-firm touch and sweet-but-sharp taste!. This plum and almond cake above is from Nigel Slater’s book, The Kitchen Diaries. I was actually looking for a marble cake at the time (last post), but found this! Ahh, thank goodness for cookbook indexes.
The Kitchen Diaries is exactly what it sounds – a year of Nigel Slater’s diary of what he has cooked and bought (food-wise) each day. Some days it is simply “was very tired – bought a pizza” but most of it is gorgeous descriptions of the food he has bought, markets he has visited and recipes he made. I was a bit worried about the cake when it came out the oven – it was very moist, but the title of the cake restored my faith in it! It was absolutely delicious, really almondy and sweet then you get a burst of flavour from the plums! I couldn’t fit all the ones above into the cake so I made some more plum compote which, happily, was delicious with the cake! Definitely worth a try for any fellow plum fans.
A wonderfully, moist, fresh plum cake from The Kitchen Diaries by Nigel Slater
Enough for 12
150g butter
150g unrefined golden caster sugar
16 plums
3 large eggs
75g plain flour
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
100g ground almonds
1. Set the oven to 180’C?/Gas Mark 4. Line the base of a square 20cm cake tin, about 6cm deep, with a piece of baking paper.
2. Beat the butter and sugar until pale and fluffy. I stop only when the mixture if light, soft and the colour of vanilla ice-cream.
3. Halve the plums, remove the stones and cut each half in two.
4. Break the eggs, beat them lightly with a fork, then add them bit-by-bit to the butter and sugar. Sift the flour and baking powder together and fold them gently into the mixture. I do this with a large metal spoon rather than the food mixer. Fold in the ground almonds.
5. Scrape the mixture into the lined cake tin. Place the quartered plums onto the cake mixture (do not worry about precision here – they sink into the cake).
6. Bake for 45minutes then test for doneness with a skewer. If it comes out clean then the cake is ready. Remove the cake from the oven and leave to cool in the tin for 15minutes before turning out.
6 comments:
mmm... plums! This looks great! Love the picture with all the plums on the board!
Lucy I have been such a bad blogger lately. I have not been visiting like I should. I am loving all the goodies you have been making here from the muffins to this lovely looking plum cake! I adore plum cake as does Todd and I know we will both enjoy this. I just bought the olive magazine today. Somehow I must have let my subscription lapse. I can't wait to get stuck into some chocolate!
The cake does look wonderfully moist! I love plums too, actually I love all fruits. I think the fruits tasted better in England.. or at least you didn't have such gigantic fruits that we have here that are sometimes tasteless.
This looks so good - I was looking for a good plum recipe, I will have to try this. Thanks.
This is one of my favourite plum recipes. If you like nuts, then it is lovely with 50g chopped walnuts stirred in just before you put the mixture in the cake tins.
In my oven it takes about 50 mins cooking time.
Lovely recipe.
If you like nuts add 50g chopped walnuts to the mixture at the end.
Takes about 50 mins to cook in my oven.
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