Baked Plum Pudding

L

Sometimes I think that I just love the Donna Hay books and magazines because of the amazing design and photos. Then, I get around to actually making a recipe, and all that design stuff? Really quite irrelavent. Because the recipes can stand on their own, no problem. Like this recent discovery from the New Food Fast cookbook, Blood Plum Tarts.

First off, it’s a great use of plums (or really any smallish stone fruit) which is good for me because even after making almost 8 cups of spicy sweet and sour plum sauce, I still have a lot of plums to use.

Secondly, it’s really quick, easy and impressive looking. The only fiddley part is trying to remove the stones from the plums and leave them with the cute little X cut out, and as it turns out, that’s not all that hard. Even if you slice too deeply, when the plum is tucked into the batter, no one will be the wiser.

Best of all, as the plum bakes it oozes just a little of its juice into the financier-like cake around it. This is simply a fantastic recipe, and I do hope that you give it a try. It’s so good that I didn’t even change anything in it!



Ok. I did change one thing. The name. I’m sure that the almond-cakey batter could be considered a crust and in some world these might be called tarts. But not in mine. Tarts should be flat, covered with lovely toppings. I could see calling them puddings, cakes, baked little ramekins of deliciousness… but tarts? Sorry. That’s just not right.

Baked Plum Pudding
from New Food Fast, Donna Hay, p 110

4oz unsalted butter, softened
1/2 cup baker’s sugar
2 eggs
1 t vanilla
3/4 cup almond flour
1/3 cup all purpose flour
4 plums

Preheat the oven to 400F.

Remove the pits from the plums by making a small X on the top. You may need to cut one side more than the other to pull out the stone.

Blend the butter and sugar together in a mixer with the paddle attachment, until it is light in color and creamy. Add everything else but the plums until just combined.

Create a little perch for the plums by putting about 1 T of the batter in the bottom of each of 4 ramekins. Then, stick the plum in the batter, with the X side up. Spoon the rest of the batter around each of the plums, leaving at least 1/2 inch of the plum showing. Use a small rubber spatula to smooth out the batter, and clean up the edges of the ramekin.

Bake for about 20 minutes, or until the cake has puffed and is lightly golden.

Best served while warm (but warn everyone… the juices of the plums get REALLY hot). But, I also still liked them when they had cooled, as the juice seeped even more into the cake.

PS: If you are coming directly to the post, you might not see some of the new changes to the blog… stop by the homepage for it’s full bloggy glory!

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0 thoughts on “Baked Plum Pudding

  1. These look really cute! I must admit I’ve got quite a stash of Donna Hay magazines now but still haven’t found my way beyond oohing and aahing at the photos

  2. oh, these are adorable. I completely agree that they are NOT tarts–if I’d ordered a tart at a restaurant and it arrived looking like one of these I’d be annoyed. With tarts I want CRUST.
    But a financier-type dough: sublime. Many, many thanks for sharing this recipe.

  3. This looks great and you did a wonderful job with Haq-esque photography! I’m a new fan of hers and just posted a recipe of hers too. Her recipes are deceptively simple and her photography is just so gorgeous!

    -Skrockodile
    (www.cookbookcatchall.blogspot.com)

  4. i love your redesigned site! it’s great — good move. and i agree — i’d call that a pudding not a tart. i’m australian and that’s not what we call a tart. donna must have had a little lapse 🙂

  5. These turned out really cute. Best of all I can get the ingredients over here in Ghana. Well, not plums. So perhaps I will be experimenting with some sort of tropical fruit version of it. It feels like a very post-colonial food experiment, merging tropical fruits with British style “pudding.” (As an American, I can’t help but think of pudding as a custard). Thanks for the great recipe.

  6. This looks like a good and simple almond cakey dish; some of the almond tarts I’ve made are so overpowered by the amount of butter in it that that’s all you can concentrate on. Intrigued by the plum use – this is now on the list of things I want to eat…

  7. Help – I tried to make this because it looks so amazing (and had some wonderful plums on hand today) but it was a disaster….where did I go wrong? The result was a gummy, pasty effect (rather than golden cake-like) … could it be that I subbed regular flour for the the almond (on top of the 1/3 c. reg flour already called for in the recipe) ? I’m not Julia Child but usually can produce decent baked goods… oh well, I did manage to salvage each of the delicious baked plums from the 4 ramekins….

  8. Hi Reva,

    Oh, yeah. You can’t sub regular flour for almond flour. Almond flour is just very finely ground almonds and will react completely differently. If you don’t have (or can’t find) almond flour, a better substitute would be to grind your own almonds in a food processor. They may not be as finely ground as the almond flour, but they should be close.

    -L

  9. I’ve been following your blog for quite a while and enjoying your wealth of good recipes. When Foodista announced that they are going to publish the best food blogs in a full color book that will be published by Andrews McMeel Publishing Fall 2010, I naturally thought of you. This recipe would be a good submission! You can enter here: http://www.foodista.com/blogbook/submit

    Cheers,
    Melissa

    melissa@foodista.com
    Editor and Community Developer
    Foodista.com — The Cooking Encyclopedia Everyone Can Edit

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