Happy new year! Didn’t 2012 whizz by?! I was meant to celebrate New Year’s Eve with a Japanese meal at a friend’s house, so I made this plum cake to take round, as plums play a big role in Japanese cooking. Unfortunately, the meal fell through, so I ended up with a lot of cake on my hands… not really an awful situation to be in!
I originally meant to try my hand at sata andagi with cinnamon cream and a plum compote, but chickened out at the last minute, partly due to a lack of time, but also because I was a bit scared of doing doughnuts for the very first time. So I decided to make a plum cake instead.
This recipe was very easy to whip up, fortunately. The most time consuming part was halving and stoning the plums; everything else was just a matter of beating together all the ingredients.
Plum cake, pre-baking
I used my square brownie tin instead of a round tin as specified in the recipe, simply because I didn’t have a round tin that was big enough. It worked fine in the end, but I needded fewer plums (10 instead of 12) and had to bake the cake for a good deal longer than the recipe said. I also cut it into 9 pieces instead of 12. I was very generous with the cinnamon on top – 1 tsp doesn’t sound like much at all!
I also made an almond cream to go with the cake; this was just a matter of whipping some double cream until thick, adding a few drops of almond extract and mixing in a little icing sugar. And that was it!
The cake was very, very nice indeed, and I will definitely make it again. It’s quite sweet, and the plum flavour combined with the cinnamon is divine. The almond cream goes really well with it; I would recommend whipping up something similar to serve with the warm cake if you try this recipe too.
Warm plum cake and almond cream
The recipe
From Allrecipes here: http://allrecipes.co.uk/recipe/17476/easy-plum-cake.aspx
I’m doubly sorry we had to cancel now. This looks divine.
Plum cake is one of my all-time faves. I love it warm with vanilla ice cream. You halved and stoned your plums very neatly – mine usually look like they’ve suffered some kind of trauma!
Ha, thanks! I don’t know how they ended up so neat – I usually make a bit of a mess when taking stones out of fruit as well! I’ll have to try it with ice cream as well.