Plum Upside Down Cake Recipe
It’s been great fun in the garden in recent weeks with all the yummy things we have been picking. This week, our lovely neighbour, Auntie Muriel, asked us to help pick the plums on her tree and said we could take as many as we liked. Daddy was very brave going up a high ladder and racing the wasps to the fruit. He managed to get lots as you can see from our picture! So, even after we shared them out with lots of people we still had loads leftover so needed a yummy recipe to make. Mummy chose a Plum Upside Down Cake from the clever Jamie Oliver (1) and it is properly deelish…
As usual, I need to inspect our pickings and ensure they meet my strict quality control standards
Plum Upside Down Cake
INGREDIENTS
• 225g butter
• 225g caster sugar
• 4 eggs beaten with 3 tbsp milk
• 100g ground almonds
• 1 tsp baking powder
• ½ tsp salt
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 150g plain flour
• 50g unblanched almonds, chopped or bashed in a pestle and mortar
Topping
• 125g butter, plus extra for greasing
• 150g light brown soft sugar
• 600g plums or greengages, stoned, halved and cut into 1cm slices
This was only some of the plums from Auntie Muriel’s tree!
METHOD
1. Start with the topping. Grease a 23cm-diameter round cake tin, then melt the butter in a pan. Stir in the sugar until the mixture is foamy and pale, about 2–3 minutes. (If it starts to separate, take it off the heat and keep stirring.) Pour into the cake tin and spread evenly. Arrange the plum slices in concentric circles over the topping, then put to one side.
2. Preheat the oven to 180C/gas 4. Cream together the butter and sugar. Beat in a quarter of the eggs at a time, mixing thoroughly between each addition. Stir in the ground almonds, baking powder, salt and vanilla extract. Fold in the flour, then stir through the chopped/bashed almonds.
3. Pour the cake mixture over the plums. Place the cake tin on a baking tray and bake for about 1 hour or until golden and a skewer comes out clean. 4 Rest the cake on a wire rack for 2 minutes before sliding a knife around the edge to loosen it. Place your serving plate over the top of the cake and carefully invert onto the plate, avoiding any juices that may escape. Gently remove the tin and replace any dislodged pieces of fruit. Serve with custard, crème fraîche or ice cream.
Upside down plum cake – very pretty!
There are lots of other lovely things you can do with plums from crumbles and chutneys to dipping sauces and jams. Plums can easily be frozen too – just cut in half, remove the stone and lay them on a baking tray with cling film over them. Once frozen, bag them and they will keep all winter and won’t all be stuck together in one big lump! Yummy cakes at Vialii Towers all winter, yay! Hope you love it as much as me!
Lulu
1. I have a friend called Jamie and a friend called Oliver. They are brothers and are very cute. For boys 😉
Harvest, Hooray!
I had a really fun weekend here at Vialii Towers with M&D. On Saturday it was really quite wet so we stayed indoors and did lots of fun arty projects with crayons, pencils, paints and glue! On Sunday the weather was a lot better which meant we could get outside and give the garden a bit of a tidy It was also time to harvest some of the fruit and vegetables we have been growing over recent months.
Now, regular readers will know that we had quite an array of vegetables we were growing this year. Some things didn’t do so well like the spring onions ‘cos someone kept climbing up onto the veg beds and lying there (1). And the cavolo nero suffered as the caterpillars decided they were going to get in there first (2)! Not to worry as we still had loads more things we were growing. Here is a pic of a few of the things we did manage to harvest at the weekend:
We harvested lots, from parsnips to chard and beetroot to turnips! Oh and some potatoes and apples too!
Lulu
1. I can’t imagine who that could have been!We had a scrummy dinner with the potatoes and Mummy roasted the beetroot, parsnips and courgette. Then she made a rhubarb crumble and a lovely Rhubarb & Lemon Cake.
2. Next year I am going to insist that we cover the kale in netting before butterflies can lay their eggs and caterpillars get munching!