Family Recipes: Plum cake
Yesterday I used a recipe I've never used before, one from my great-grandmother. I have no personal memories of this woman, as she died when I was very small, and the main reason I chose the recipe was to use some of the huge amount of plums we have at the moment. My Mum has fond memories of this cake, so I was really looking forward to giving it a go and tasting it for myself.
Only to find that it is difficult to follow a simple recipe if the woman who passed it on to another generation was the kind of person who deliberately gave less than the full information required...
I had heard my mother tell me stories of this kind a few times before, especially the story of when she compared a recipe she had acquired from her grandmother to the version her cousin had. Mum had realised she'd asked for the recipe on two different occasions, and then found each copy she had was different from the other. When she compared it with her cousin's version, they were both surprised to find this one was different again!
So yesterday, when we had combined all the ingredients, the mix looked like a very dry dough - nothing like what I expected a cake batter to look like! What to add? Mum suggested milk (the recipe had none so far), so that is what I added, and finally it looked more like what I expected.
Next problem was, did we put the slices of plum in the cake tin before the batter, on top of the batter, or on the finished cake? Not so easy to figure out, as I have very rarely cooked with fresh fruit, and had never seen this particular cake before, since Mum never ended up using the recipe herself.
So we tried two out of the three options (plum in first, and plum added after baking) only to conclude the correct method must be adding the plum to the top of the batter in the cake tin. Which means I'll have to attempt what turned out to be a very yummy cake again sometime soon. And maybe this time I'll take a photo before it is all eaten!
Only to find that it is difficult to follow a simple recipe if the woman who passed it on to another generation was the kind of person who deliberately gave less than the full information required...
I had heard my mother tell me stories of this kind a few times before, especially the story of when she compared a recipe she had acquired from her grandmother to the version her cousin had. Mum had realised she'd asked for the recipe on two different occasions, and then found each copy she had was different from the other. When she compared it with her cousin's version, they were both surprised to find this one was different again!
So yesterday, when we had combined all the ingredients, the mix looked like a very dry dough - nothing like what I expected a cake batter to look like! What to add? Mum suggested milk (the recipe had none so far), so that is what I added, and finally it looked more like what I expected.
Next problem was, did we put the slices of plum in the cake tin before the batter, on top of the batter, or on the finished cake? Not so easy to figure out, as I have very rarely cooked with fresh fruit, and had never seen this particular cake before, since Mum never ended up using the recipe herself.
So we tried two out of the three options (plum in first, and plum added after baking) only to conclude the correct method must be adding the plum to the top of the batter in the cake tin. Which means I'll have to attempt what turned out to be a very yummy cake again sometime soon. And maybe this time I'll take a photo before it is all eaten!
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