I'm in love with my new cook book,it's called "Italian Easy recipes from the London River Cafe". The book itself is not new, I think it came out in 2004, but I discovered it at a friend's house a few weeks ago and really liked the recipes in it, they are easy, fun and soooo yummy, and Yes, I read cook books, as a matter of fact I love to read cook books! I got this one here, I usually go for the used ones and I don't mind that it's not new as long as it's in good shape, it's a great affordable way to buy books.
It also looks smashing:
So Friday night we had a little diner party and I made the Plum and Orange cake, it was A m a z i n g !
(photo from the book)
definitely one of the best cakes I ever made, so I decided to share the recipe with you, I made some minor changes , I didn't have Vanilla bean so I used a little natural vanilla extract instead.
Ingredients
For the filling:
4 large plums (or 5 small ones)
1 orange
1/4 cup sugar
1 vanilla bean (I used 2 tablespoon on vanilla extract, the natural kind)
For the cake:
2/3 cups of blanched almonds (I used Sliced Almonds)
1 1/4 sticks unsalted soften butter
3/4 cups sugar
2 eggs
2/3 cups all purpose flour
1 1/4 tsp baking powder
For the topping:
1 orange
2 tbs unsalted butter
2 tbs of Muscovado sugar
1/2 cup of slivered almonds (I used the sliced almonds again)
Heat oven to 350F
Finely grate the peel of the orange and squeeze the juice, halve and pit the plums (I cut them into med. size pieces because they were not very ripe).
Put the plums, orange juice, orange peel and split vanilla bean (or extract) into a baking dish, I lined the dish with baking paper, blend everything together well and put in the oven for 20 min, cool and scrape in the vanilla seeds if you used a stick.
Grease a 10" round spring form pan with lots of butter and line with baking paper.
Grind the almonds for the cake batter in the food processor, beat the butter with the sugar until it's light and fluffy and add the eggs (one by one).
Fold in the flour, baking powder and ground almonds.
Pour into pan and push the plums and their juices into and over the batter, I did this with my fingers and swooshed around a little of the juice from the pan on top of the cake too, (it looks like too much plums but the cake rises over them and comes out fine).
Bake the cake for 30 min (this is only half baked until the next step) remove from oven and lower the heat to 325"
For the topping. Finely grate the orange peel (you don't need juice here),melt the butter, stir in the sugar, orange peel and almonds, mix.
Scatter this over the half baked cake and bake for 1 hour longer.( I baked it for 45 minutes more, I think I would have burned it for 1 hour longer so stick around and check it and decide, I guess it really depends on the oven).
cool the cake IN THE PAN!
The cake is not very high it's somewhere between a tart and a cake.
I served it with vanilla Ice cream. Yum.
Good luck!
