Lemon plum cake recipe

A lovely couple from our church keep bringing in boxes of plums for people to help themselves to. Since in-season plums cost around $6 per kilo at my local supermarket, I'm pretty excited about these free goodies.

A little while back I saw Annabel Langbein make Vanilla plum cake on her TV show The Free Range Cook, but wasn't planning to make it because of the high cost of plums. Now that I've got a stash of free ones, I thought this cake would be the perfect use for some of them.

I've changed the name to Lemon plum cake, because it tastes more like lemon than vanilla to me, but that might be because I chucked a whole lot of lemon zest in it from the stash I keep in my freezer.

The cake part is delicious. The cooked plums are somewhat tart, so you might want to add a dollop of plum jam on top to sweeten them up. In any case, here's the recipe as laid out in Annabel Langbein: The Free Range Cook. As you all probably know by now, I'm a big fan of Annabel.

Ingredients

• 12 plums or apricots, or 6 peaches
• 300g butter, softened
• 1 1/2c sugar
• 3 eggs
• finely grated zest of 1 lemon (or more if you love lemon)
• 1t vanilla extract
• 1c buttermilk or yoghurt (I had neither so used kefir and that worked fine. I'm sure milk would also work well.)
• 3 1/2c self raising flour

To dust:

• 2T icing sugar

Method

1. Preheat oven to 160°C (320°F). Grease one small roasting dish or two 20cm (8 inch) spring-form cake tins and line with baking paper. 

2. Halve the plums or apricots, or quarter the peaches, remove pips and put to one side.

3. Cream together the butter and sugar. 

4. Beat in the eggs one at a time. 

5. Mix in the lemon zest and vanilla. 

6. Gently stir in the buttermilk or yoghurt and the flour until evenly combined. Do not overmix.

7. Spoon the batter into the prepared roasting dish or cake tins. Spread it out evenly, smoothing the top.

8. Arrange the fruit on top, cut side up. (This is where you might also want to dollop some plum jam into the hollow left by the pip.)

9. Bake for 50-60 minutes until the cake is set and golden. The fruit will sink into the cake as it cooks. 

If you're not planning to eat the cake that day, it can be frozen for later use.

Dust with icing sugar to serve.