Yellow Plum & Apricot Cake

Otherwise known as Nigel Slater Strikes Again! I pulled this recipe from one of the first books I got by him: The Kitchen Diaries.

I LOVE this book. It's such a lovely ode to seasonal eating.

The finished cake.

It is delicious, but needs less butter. When I first pulled this out of the pan, it was slick with it! I'll post the recipe with my adaptations. Warning: you'll need a scale for this

The Recipe

butter -125g
brown sugar - 150g
apricots - 4
plums - 4
eggs - 3, lightly beaten
vanilla - ½ tsp
flour - 75g
baking powder - 1½ tsp
ground almonds - 100g
chopped toasted walnuts - 50g

Preheat your oven to 350. Line the base of an 8" cake pan with parchment paper.

Beat the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy. If you do this in a kitchen aid mixer, you'll have your hands free to remove the stones from your apricots and plums and then quarter them. If you don't have a kitchen aid, you'll need to figure out an appropriate place for this step! Perhaps assign it to the friend you have over, or the small Victorian orphan you've pulled off the street to clean your chimney. I'm sure he'll appreciate the cake.

Add the beaten eggs bit by bit to the creamed butter and sugar, until fully incorporated. Stir in vanilla. In a separate bowl, sift together flour and baking powder. Fold them gently into the butter-sugar-egg mixture. Stir in ground almonds and chopped walnuts.

Scrape the whole mixture into your prepared cake pan, and place the quartered fruit on top. You could do this in a pretty fashion, but there's not much point, as the batter will rise up over most of the fruit to cover it. See?

Cake in a not-so-pretty pan.

Bake for 40-45 minutes. Test with a skewer - if it comes out clean, your cake is done! Let the whole thing cool on a rack for 15 minutes before turning it out.

Cut into 16 brownie sized squares and serve with a dollop of whipped cream!