Plum and almond cake

Well, I was really popular today at work, thanks to Shaheen at Allotment to Kitchen's yummy plum cake recipe.

The plums into the allotment have all been ripening over the past week or so. It's my first year of getting plums so is quite exciting. I bought the tree from QD for about £6 about 3 years ago. It's tap root had been cut off to fit in the pot so I didn't expect that much from it but lo and behold it's been worth the wait. It's a variety called opal.

So looking for plum recipes I had a search of Shaheen's blog and this one caught my eye. Jan helped make it and we were also making plum chutney at the same time.

The recipe is nice and easy, just remember you need to allow time for your butter to have softened first. Here's the pre-baked mixture - you put in half, layer out half the plums, add the rest of the mixture then put the rest of the plums on.

And the finished result! The cake mixture rises up to cover the top plums. It took a little bit longer to bake than in the recipe but things seem to always do that with our oven. I might also put flaked almonds on another time (I love almonds).

The cake didn't last very long, my hungry colleagues devoured it in few minutes and people were rushing from all over the office to get a bit!

This recipe is definitely a keeper!

 

 

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Kalhua and courgette brownie bars

I was having a look at Shaheen's excellent food blog http://allotment2kitchen.blogspot.co.uk the other day and spotted this recipe from 2010 that she's highlighted on her homepage -  http://allotment2kitchen.blogspot.co.uk/2010/07/kahlua-courgette-brownie-bars.html, I just happened to have all the ingredients including an old bottle of Kalhua that had been knocking around for years so decided to give it a go last night....yum!

I haven't got a tray bake tray so did it in a glass oblong dish instead which worked out fine. One slice wasn't enough as a taster and we munched our way through a couple each. Still lots left for the weekend though, phew.

I forgot to give it a Kalhua wash before baking but still turned out quite shiny. Also I don't normally have much caffeine (except for in choc) so probably best not to give it too much Kalhua for me. I did experiment with a bit of a mixture of sugar as we had some odds and ends of packets left, so the sugar was mainly soft light brown, with a bit of muscavado and white granulated and I made sure it was all mixed in as evenly as possible.

So I was quite pleased as don't do much baking usually :)