Baking on command: Plum Cake

A hazard of being known as an avid baker? Sometimes you go home and you're met with a bowl of sub-par plums and the gentle command suggestion that you do something with them. Aye, aye, Captain!

No, no, I kid. But I did head home for a little family time this weekend and since there were some plums which weren't quite juicy enough to be satisfying eaten alone, I decided that they would be perfectly fine for baking a plum cake. And, as usual, Dorie Greenspan to the rescue! I've made plum cakes before using mostly German recipes, which usually have you cutting the butter in to the flour, but this one just has you cream the butter and sugar together and it comes together in literally 5 minutes. Slicing the plums is probably the most time consuming part of this cake.


For something that takes so little time to put together, this is definitely a gorgeous looking cake, in that rustic kind of way. Although, as it turns out, plums that aren't juicy enough for eating...aren't really juicy enough for baking in this cake, either. That's my only complaint--these plums didn't really get "jammy" enough. Still, the cake base is delicious (flavored with cinnamon rather than cardamom) and I will definitely be making this again.


Oh hey, and this recipe only used 5 tablespoons of butter. In my world, that qualifies as health food. Now why did I leave the rest of the cake behind?!

(The recipe used is the Dimply Plum Cake from Dorie Greenspan's brilliant book Baking: From My Home To Yours. Go buy it! You can also find the recipe reproduced online in many, many different places.)