Mieze's Plum Cake

 

Red plums are in season at the moment and they are perfect for making this very special cake. However in North Queensland, unfortunately it's a short season and they aren't available for long. This cake makes an incredibly delicious dessert, or is perfect to serve if friends are coming over for coffee, or even have it ready for Easter, which will be upon us before we know it.

This is another Mahjong cake special edition. Whenever I host Mahjong at home, I make a special kind of sweet treat, as do all the ladies when it is their turn. This is a tradition that transcends over 10 years and we really look forward to our cake and coffee, and our Mahjong. We often have 10 ladies attending now so a cake of this size works well.

Building the wall at Mahjong

This recipe was originally created by Australia's very own iconic chef Stephanie Alexander, and she called it Mieze's Plum Cake, after an Austrian friend of her parents who introduced her family to this cake over 40 years ago. It has really stood the test of time. It's the perfect dessert to finish with after a delicious meal and it is my favourite plum cake to bake.

When raw, firm and tart plums are baked with a cake batter, they become soft, jammy, sweet and slightly caramelized. They are absolutely delicious to eat, and the texture of this cake is the perfect base for the fruit.

 
The less cake mixture in the base the better, so only filling the cake tin a quarter full with the cake mixture is the preferable way to make the cake. It rises so well. I have also baked the original and larger recipe for this cake, in a smaller 23 cm tin and used the extra batter to bake a smaller cake for Mr. HRK. That kept him happy until the other one was served up a day later.

This is a photo of the first Plum Cake I made. Somehow I forgot to take a photo of the whole cake this time, just photos of the slices.

Let's Bake:

Serves 10-12 

Please note: This recipe requires a 26 cm springform tin which I don't own, and I couldn't find one to buy in time, so I used my 24.5 cm x 6.5 cm (9 1/2 x 2 1/2 in) Springform Wiltshire tin which worked perfectly. However, if you do own a 26 cm springform tin by all means use that. This recipe needs a springform tin as the delicious plummy jammy topping could get messy when turning out the cake.

Ingredients:

180 g softened butter
150 g sugar
135 g plain flour
135 g self-raising flour
pinch of salt
2 large eggs, lightly beaten
70 ml milk
1/2 cup ground almonds or fresh breadcrumbs
10-12 red or ripe blood plums, halved and stoned

TOPPING
60 g butter
1/2 cup castor sugar
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
2 large eggs

Method:

Preheat oven to 180 deg C and lightly grease a 26 cm spring form tin. Cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy in your electric mixer, then slowly mix in flours and salt. 

Add the eggs individually and the milk to make a soft dough ( the mixture should drop easily from the spoon.) Spoon batter into the prepared tin (it should not fill more than a quarter of the depth of the tin as the cake rises a great deal), and scrape the mixing bowl well with a spatula. Sprinkle over the ground almonds.

Arrange the plums, cut-side up on top, starting around the outside edge and working towards the centre.

To make the topping, melt the butter and stir in the sugar and cinnamon, then allow to cool. Whisk eggs well and stir into cooled butter mixture. Spoon the topping over and around the plums on top of the cake. 

Bake for 1 hour, and test with a skewer that the cake is cooked in the centre.

Serve warm with cream or ice-cream. Any leftover cake can be warmed up, wrapped in foil in the oven at 180 deg. C for 15 minutes. There won't be much left over though, I assure you.

This recipe is a smaller version  of the one Stephanie first published in her cookbook, "The Cook's Companion", in 1996, which used 20 plums and served 12 or a crowd as she said. I didn't need to make one that large, so this is a smaller recipe, which was still a sufficient size to feed 10 of my Mahjong friends for afternoon tea.

Here is the link to my original post on Happy Retiree's Kitchen for the Plum cake recipe taken from Stephanie Alexander's original recipe book:
https://happyretireeskitchen.blogspot.com/2020/03/gorgeous-german-plum-cake.html

Best wishes

Pauline