What do you do when your husband returns from the Sunday farmers market with a giant bag of plums – “they were on offer!”, he said. I should also mention, he also came home with a giant bag of green grapes and our usual flat (or is it a half-flat? There are nine of those little green baskets worth) of strawberries. And in the fridge also had clementines, apples, and a few pluots.

We do eat quite a bit of fruits – it’s our usual dessert after lunch and dinner – but that was quite a lot of plums.

So it was off to the Internet for a fun plum cake recipe, and this one by Smitten Kitchen looked delicious and easy. I especially liked that I only need to half and pit the plums – it was a busy day in the kitchen as I was also planning to cook up as much of the San Marzano tomatoes that I had harvested.

I followed her instructions although I only baked it for about 35 minutes – the skewer I stuck in came out clean, but on hindsight, I should have stuck it in in another spot as well to check.

The problem was that after letting the cake cool for 15 minutes (and thus having the plum juices seep into the cake), I had to invert it onto a plate and then onto a cooling rack, as I always do for cakes. But when I tipped it over, I realised that a little bit in the middle of the cake was a bit soggy and the inversion process had dripped some juices onto my counter. So it wasn’t as firm a cake as I imagined it would be. That could be due to a couple of things:

• I had put in the maximum number of plum halves I could squeeze into my 9×9 cake tin.
• I should have baked it for longer – questionable, as the skewer I used to test it came out clean.
• A couple of the plums I used were a bit riper than the others (but they weren’t falling apart overripe, they cut in half cleanly)

Still it was a delicious cake. I loved how the plum juices turned it reddish, and it was a good excuse to eat some at breakfast – it’s mostly fruit!

Have you made any plum cakes? And what’s your favourite?

Weekend Cooking was started by Beth Fish Reads and is now hosted by The Intrepid Reader and is open to anyone who has any kind of food-related post to share: Book (novel, nonfiction) reviews, cookbook reviews, movie reviews, recipes, random thoughts, gadgets, quotations, beer, wine, photographs