mieze's plum cake

mieze's plum cake

• 24 Mar 2014

Hi every-one, you'd have thought I'd be over my plum obsession by now but no. Since my last plum cake post, I've been oven roasting plums with honey and orange juice which I serve with homemade labne and I've made a batch of plum jam as well. Next I want to make a rustic plum tart before the plum season is over.



Last weekend I came home with a big bag of plums from our trip into Maitland and decided it was was time to try this plum cake recipe from Stephanie Alexander.



In the end I slightly adapted my usual plum cake recipe and topped it with the Stephanie Alexander plum topping.



I took the cake into work and waited for the response. No-one really said anything about the cake but when lunch time arrived and there wasn't a single crumb left, I took that as a positive sign. I ate my slice of plum cake during the weekend and it's pretty yummy with a moist vanilla scented base and a cinnamony plum topping.



Here's the recipe for you. If you'd like to make a 23 cm cake, just double the ingredients, the cooking time remains the same.

Mieze’s Plum Cake – Jillian’s adapted version

Ingredients

100 g softened unsalted butter

70 g (scant ⅓ cup) caster sugar

1 tsp vanilla extract

½ cup self-raising flour

¼ cup plain flour

¼ cup almond meal

1 large egg, lightly beaten

3 tbl buttermilk

Additional ¼ cup ground almonds or fresh breadcrumbs

6-8 ripe plums, stoned and quartered

Topping

30 g butter

¼ cup caster sugar

1 tsp ground cinnamon

1 large egg

Method

Preheat oven to 200°C and lightly grease and line a 16 cm spring-form tin.

To make the topping

Melt butter and stir in the sugar and cinnamon. Allow to cool a little.

Whisk the egg well and stir into cooled butter mixture. Set to one side.

To make the cake

In a small bowl, mix together the flours and almond meal.

Cream the butter, sugar and vanilla until light and fluffy. Mix the egg with the buttermilk and then add to flour mixture. Mix to make a softish dough (it should drop easily from the spoon).

Spoon batter into prepared tin (it should not fill more than a quarter of the depth, as the cake rises a great deal), smooth the top and sprinkle over ground almonds. Arrange plums on top, cut-side up, starting around outside edge and working towards centre. Spoon the topping over and around plums on cake.

Place cake in oven and reduce temperature to 180°C. Bake for 50 minutes to 1 hour, until a fine skewer inserted in the centre comes out clean.

To serve 

Serve warm with cream, yoghurt or ice-cream. Any leftover cake can be warmed, wrapped in foil, in the oven at 180°C for 15 minutes.

Just the other day I counted the weeks until I fly to Amsterdam and it's now just 7 weeks. With Easter just around the corner the next month will just fly by. As well as Amsterdam, I'll be spending some time in London, Paris, Copenhagen and Brussels. As it's been a while since my last shop shoot I thought it might be fun to shoot a few shops while I'm away.

If any of my blog readers can suggest some new and exciting shops for me to photograph on my trip I'd be grateful. I like to contact the shop owners in advance to schedule a day and time so you can email your suggestions to me (my email address is in the 'about me' section on the blog) or just leave the information in the comments section if you prefer.

See you all again next week,

Jillian