Plum-a-palooza: A Small Plum Cake for Four

At the farmer's market this week, my husband picked up a few pounds of shiro plums. The shiro plum is a Japanese variety and isn't white, as the name might lead you to believe, but yellow.

Shiro plums are sweet and bright, but also happen to be clingstone, which may deter you if segmenting clingstone fruits annoys you.

Truth be told, although I had asked him to pick up some interesting fruit, I wasn't really sure what I was going to do with 4lbs of these plums. In the end, I opted to make a small plum cake and to use the rest of the fruit in a jam (which I've started and is currently sitting in my fridge waiting for a flavour infusion tomorrow - vanilla? star anise? cardamon? I definitely want the vanilla... but I can't decide what, if anything, else to put in).

Plum Cake

(adapted from Martha Stewart)

Ingredients

¼ cup + 2 tbsp butter, at room temperature
½ cup all purpose flour
¼ cup spelt flour (you can use all purpose instead)
¼ tsp baking soda
generous pinch kosher salt
¼ cup packed brown sugar
¼ cup granulated sugar
1 egg + 1 egg white
½ tsp vanilla extract
zest of one lemon
1/3 cup plain yogurt
4 plums, halved, pitted and cut into 6-8 slices

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 375º. Generously butter and flour a small, 6" springform pan. Set aside.

2. In a small bowl, sift together flours, baking soda and salt.

3. In the bowl of a mixer (or, using a hand mixer), cream together butter. Gradually add in sugars. Once mixture is light and fluffy, add in whole egg then the egg white. Once this is incorporated, add in vanilla, lemon zest and yogurt.

4. Add flour mixture to wet ingredients in 2 batches, making sure each batch is incorporated before adding the next one. Pour batter into prepared pan. Smooth.

5. Arrange plum slices over the top of the batter. Place in oven for 30 minutes. Remove, loosely tent with foil and return to oven for an additional 35 minutes. Cake is done when a skewer inserted into centre comes out clean.

Let cool on rack on counter. Cake is best eaten the day it was made! Might I recommend some ice cream, whipped cream or a sifting of icing sugar?

You may have noticed in the picture that I've cut the cake into more than four slices... we weren't particularly hungry, so smaller was the way to go!

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

Summer Markets

Wednesday is the day for my local farmer's market, and to tell the truth, today was the first time I've gone all year. My husband and I mozied about last year once, but I just thought it was too expensive at the time. Given the threat of the termination of my employment, it probably was.

I had 15$ in my pocket today, so I decided to flee the air conditioned glory of the front room of my house and brave into the 40 degree heat outside to see what was available.

I spent the 15$.

Purchases:

1 mixed basket of peaches, plums, pears and apricots - 6$
1 pint of heirloom grape and cherry tomatoes - 5$
1 pint of fresh field peas - 4$

Mixed Fruits (crisp pears, peaches, apricots and yellow plums)

Huh. That 15$ went very quickly. Now I just need to figure out what I'm going to do with it.