I've made lots of plum cakes with lots of different varieties of plums, but my favorite in recent memory was a plum torte made with Italian plums -- smallish oval freestone purple-skinned plums with yellow-green flesh. That was actually the first time I ever baked with Italian plums, and the results were so fantastic that I was eager to try it again. I decided to make Carole Walter's recipe for "Italian Purple Plum Cake" from Great Cakes.
You make this cake batter in the food processor. You combine flour, sugar, baking powder and salt, add frozen butter and process until the mixture forms fine crumbs, and finally pour in the wet ingredients (egg yolks, milk vanilla) and pulse until a soft dough forms. You turn the dough out into a buttered pan and press the dough up the sides a half inch. Then you arrange cut plums on top, sprinkle on some sugar, and bake. The most time consuming part of making this cake was pressing the dough into the bottom and up the sides of the pan; the dough was quite sticky and this was a messy process, even with floured hands.
The cake looked quite odd when I put it into the oven because the dough was pressed up the sides of the pan and the plums were simply lying in a concave shell of dough. But after baking, the center of the cake ended up at almost the same height as the edges. The batter rose enough to secure all of the fruit (which I didn't push into the batter before baking), but not enough to obscure the neat concentric circles of plums I had carefully arranged.
This cake was fine, but it was disappointing because it was not as good as the plum torte. Although the ingredient lists for the two cakes are quite similar, this cake was not as flavorful and it was dry. The batter for this cake was definitely a bit drier to start out with, given that it had a stiff enough consistency that it could be pressed into a cake pan. I think with a scoop of ice cream (or perhaps whipped cream), the cake would have been much improved. But given that the plum torte is so delectable all on its own, I'm just going to stick with that recipe instead.
Recipe: "Italian Purple Plum Cake" from Great Cakes, by Carole Walter.
Previous Post: "Five Minutes to Plum Heaven: Plum Torte," September 3, 2012.
You make this cake batter in the food processor. You combine flour, sugar, baking powder and salt, add frozen butter and process until the mixture forms fine crumbs, and finally pour in the wet ingredients (egg yolks, milk vanilla) and pulse until a soft dough forms. You turn the dough out into a buttered pan and press the dough up the sides a half inch. Then you arrange cut plums on top, sprinkle on some sugar, and bake. The most time consuming part of making this cake was pressing the dough into the bottom and up the sides of the pan; the dough was quite sticky and this was a messy process, even with floured hands.
This cake was fine, but it was disappointing because it was not as good as the plum torte. Although the ingredient lists for the two cakes are quite similar, this cake was not as flavorful and it was dry. The batter for this cake was definitely a bit drier to start out with, given that it had a stiff enough consistency that it could be pressed into a cake pan. I think with a scoop of ice cream (or perhaps whipped cream), the cake would have been much improved. But given that the plum torte is so delectable all on its own, I'm just going to stick with that recipe instead.
Recipe: "Italian Purple Plum Cake" from Great Cakes, by Carole Walter.
Previous Post: "Five Minutes to Plum Heaven: Plum Torte," September 3, 2012.
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