This has been a season of great plum cakes. Usually I only make plum cakes in the fall for Rosh Hashanah, but this year I've been inspired by the different varieties of beautiful plums at the farmer's market to make plum cakes throughout the summer. When I recently saw Italian prune plums at the market, I couldn't resist. I decided to make a plum torte.
This plum torte recipe looks quite plain. To make the batter all you need to do is cream butter and sugar, and add flour, baking powder, eggs, and salt. You spread the mixture in a pan, arrange Italian plum halves on top, sprinkle on cinnamon sugar, and bake. If you don't count the time I was waiting for the butter to soften before mixing the batter, it only took about five minutes to put the whole cake together, including preparing the plums (since Italian plums are freestone, pitting them requires hardly any time at all). The flesh of the purple-skinned plums was light greenish-yellow, but after I sprinkled on a liberal layer of cinnamon sugar, the color of the flesh was completely obscured by the cinnamon.
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The layer of cake batter was quite short in the pan and I simply laid the plums on top before baking, without pressing them into the batter. It took over an hour for the torte to finish baking, and while it was in the oven, the batter rose to envelop much of the fruit. This torte may be my favorite plum cake to date. The cake flavor and consistency is very similar to a coffee cake (the recipe headnote says the flavor is "old-fashioned," and that description is right on) and is beautiful in its simplicity. The plums didn't release much juice, so the cake was not soggy at all. The ratio of plums to cake was perfect, with lots of sweet delicious fruit in every bite. The Italian plums are the star of this torte, which is a wonderful example of how something so simple can be simply delicious.
Recipe: "Plum Torte" from Cooking for Comfort by Marian Burros, recipe available here from The New York Times.
Previous Posts:
This plum torte recipe looks quite plain. To make the batter all you need to do is cream butter and sugar, and add flour, baking powder, eggs, and salt. You spread the mixture in a pan, arrange Italian plum halves on top, sprinkle on cinnamon sugar, and bake. If you don't count the time I was waiting for the butter to soften before mixing the batter, it only took about five minutes to put the whole cake together, including preparing the plums (since Italian plums are freestone, pitting them requires hardly any time at all). The flesh of the purple-skinned plums was light greenish-yellow, but after I sprinkled on a liberal layer of cinnamon sugar, the color of the flesh was completely obscured by the cinnamon.
.JPG)
Recipe: "Plum Torte" from Cooking for Comfort by Marian Burros, recipe available here from The New York Times.
Previous Posts:
- "It Looks Like Peach, and It's Just Peachy: Almond-Plum Buckle," August 1, 2012.
- "Small Fruits Deliver Big Flavor: Plum and Blueberry Upside-Down Torte," July 10, 2012.
- "How Can Upside Down Be So Right?: Plum Upside Down Cake," October 3, 2011.
- "Putting the 'Cake' Back into 'Coffeecake': Plum Streusel Coffeecake," September 30, 2011.
- "Back to Our Regularly Scheduled Programming: Crunchy-Topped Whole-Wheat Plum Cake," September 7, 2010.
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