Plum Crazy

It’s mid-August and Tongham Community Wood is full of luscious, ripe fruit – including a bumper crop of plums. There are large, juicy Victoria plums and the smaller, tart Damsons, but none of the small yellow mirabelles. A snap frost while the trees were in blossom must have frozen the flowers and destroyed all hope of the sweet yellow fruit, but our purple plums have been saved – much to our local delight.

I was out the other evening picking plums with friends and in addition to the fun of scrambling around in the nettles, climbing ladders and dropping fruit on each other’s heads, we brought in a good harvest. Most years I make plum jam – so easy in the Thermomix because you don’t have to fiddle around taking the stones out. Just put the whole plums to gently cook and stir on reverse blade function and the stones will release from the cooked fruit. Fast and easy!

But as it turns out, my ThermoHubby doesn’t like plum jam. He’s an orange marmalade man and regardless of the creative flavours I add to my plums, I can’t get him to eat my jam. So what to make to tickle his taste buds and drive him plum crazy?

I turned to my library of Thermomix cookbooks and took out Travelling with Thermomix, a collection of over 80 recipes from 23 countries around the world. Published by Vorwerk – the German company that has been manufacturing high-quality home appliances for more than 125 years and the creator of the Thermomix phenomenon – this cookbook includes a fast and easy recipe for a typical Australian Plum Cake. Brilliant! Just what I was looking for.

Plum Cake
A typical Australian dessert or tea cake, combining a cake base with fresh fruit and a crumble topping. Serves 12 to 24 depending on the size of the portions.

Ingredients

Dough
2 eggs
250 g sugar
120 g butter, soft, cut into pieces
300 g plain flour
2 tsp baking powder
1000 g plums, halved and pitted

Crumble

200 g plain flour
120 g butter, cut into pieces
100 g sugar
1 tsp vanilla sugar

Method

Make the Dough

1. Preheat oven to 180° C. Grease and flour a 40 x 24 x 6 cm rectangular baking pan.
2. Place eggs, sugar and butter into TM bowl, mix 1 minute/Speed 4.
3. Add flour and baking powder. Turn dial to lid locked position and knead 40 seconds on the Dough setting.
4. Spread dough into your prepared baking tray or tin.
5. Place plum halves on top, cut side up.

Make the Crumble

1. Place all ingredients into the Thermomix bowl. Turbo pulse into crumbs.*
2. Evenly spread the crumble topping over the plum halves. Bake in preheated oven for 40 – 45 minutes or until the top is golden and a toothpick inserted into a doughy part of the cake comes out clean.

*The original recipe in Travelling with Thermomix says to mix 15 seconds/Speed 6 but my crumble topping nearly turned into more batter so I recommend the crumble method from Fast and Easy Cooking, the 300-recipe cookbook that comes with every Thermomix TM31 purchased from UK Thermomix.

When I served this for dessert tonight, my ThermoHubby who doesn’t like plums took one look at it and said, “That looks OK but I won’t eat all of it.” But guess what? He did! And now it’s one of his favourite cakes 😉

Bon appétit !

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