Plum Cake

I subscribe to a Tuesday Recipe email from Tori Ritchie. The recipes are always interesting by I think this is the first one I've used. It came just as we were wondering what to do with the rest of the Italian prune plums. They were getting soft and very ripe. We'd made a Plum Tart with the first part of them, but wanted to do something different. A friend came over for dinner on Wednesday night so that gave us a good excuse to make the Plum Cake. The batter was especially good with almond and lemon flavors. My plums were a little past prime and so it was hard to cut them. My other problem was that I didn't have a spring form pan and the plums sinking into the batter made parts of the cake weaker. So when I turned it out onto a plate, the middle fell a part a bit. It still looked and tasted good. I think I'll be using the cake dough recipe again with another fruit like apples or pears.

Here is what's left of the cake.

Plum Tart

At the apple orchard on Saturday, we noticed their Italian plum trees and bough a quart of the plums. In the process of unloading the car, half of them dropped on the ground. That meant we needed to do something with them right away rather than snack on them over the course of the coming week. I was planning on making a free form apple tart with a recipe from Mark Bittman this week, but instead I modified it to become a plum tart.

The dough was from Bitten:

1 and 1/4 cups flour
pinch salt
3 tablespoons sugar
8 tablespoons cold butter
1 egg yolk

Combine the flour, salt, sugar in food processor and pulse to mix. Chop butter into pieces and then add butter and egg to flour mixture. Pulse in food processor until well mixed about 10 seconds. Pour into a bowl and add cold water, one tablespoon at a time. Mix after each tablespoon of water. After about 3 or 4 tablespoons, dough should be able to be gathered into a ball. Refrigerate 1 hour wrapped in plastic or freeze for 15 minutes.

Filling:
3/4 lb. Italian plums
2 tablespoons sugar
3 tablespoons currant jelly
dash of salt
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/4 tsp ground cloves

Cut the plums in half, remove the pit, and then quarter. Mix all the filling ingredients together in a bowl.

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.

Roll or press dough out into a circle and place in a pie pan. It's ok if the dough doesn't come all the way up the sides, but you do want it to have a bit of an edge. Pour the fruit mixture into the middle of the dough. You may want to leave some of the juice out if your fruit mixture has been sitting. Another alternative would be to pre-bake the crust for 3-5 mintues. Bake tart for 20 to 30 minutes until dough begins to turn golden.

When making the tart this time, I made it a free-form tart which was flat on on a baking stone. The plum mixture had a lot of liquid that over flowed the sides of the dough from the start. We placed it in the oven anyways, but there was too much juice and it was running over the edges of the dough and pan and burning in the oven. So midway through the baking, we lifted the tart up (luckily I had put it on parchment paper) and placed it in a pie pan to bake the rest of the time.

Next time I'll bake it in a pie pan from the start.