Category Archives: Sweet Stuff

Stone Fruit Yoghurt Cake with Plums

: Lets hear it for the plums! Yay!

I haven’t made a cake for a while now but at the weekend I made a version of Dan Lepard’s stone fruit yoghurt cake from the Guardian recipes this time last year. I know Caroline makes this cake a lot – see her lovely summer version of this cake here. I had some dark skinned plums that hadn’t made it into the latest batch of plum preserves, and a little pot of mahlab, (obscure ingredient of desire sourced here) duck eggs which are great for cakes, and some yoghurt made with double cream (whistles and looks the other way).

I want to put it on record, that I’ve decided that I can make cake with pieces of fresh fruit in after all. The last time I attempted to make a cake with fresh fruit it went very wrong, have a look here:-

what can I say?

Using this recipe it came out like this:

: Just out of the oven

Once it was cooked, we left it to cool for a bit and then turned it out. With great restraint left it to cool and then ate it with some more of the supersonic yoghurt. Yum. I really recommend treating yourself to double cream yoghurt once in a while. It comes out like a cross between clotted cream and creme fraiche. I might put some it in some scones next.

: Oh Yes ! It’s looking good !

This cake made 8 glorious slices:

We had two test pieces the day it was made, and a further two pieces on Sunday afternoon for tea in the great outdoors, having burnt a few calories rambling in some fantastic woods in Gloucestershire.

Another two pieces were warmed up in the oven and then forgotten, thus evolving into an all together different sort of cake with a gorgeous crusty caramelised exterior which we had on Monday night; and the final two pieces a few nights ago with some extra cooked plums (microwaved with vanilla and cinnamon and a little sugar) and a little more cream yoghurt. School puddings were never like this….

: Ah memories!

Now it’s all gone.

To make divinely decadent yoghurt, or maybe what I made was creme fraiche? you take 200 grams of double cream, heat it gently till it just comes near the boil, allow to cool down, add two teaspoons of yoghurt and mix in and then leave to culture as you would any yoghurt you make at home. A perfect way to use up transform elderly cream that you forgot about in the fridge.

Temper temper…

Please excuse the lack of mature comment in this post, my inner child has surfaced again…

Hee hee Celia! I finally had a go at this.

Dominos anyone?

Notice all those hits on the tempering page of your blog Fig Jam and Lime Cordial today? That was me.

There is only so much reading about home made chocolate a friend can absorb and not want to have a go too. I have resisted for a long time now and today I realised resistance was futile and I wanted to join the Chocolate Borg. I think what I ended up with was tempered, the chocolate squares go snap, the raisin bark bends – but that’s the raisins I think, and the smooth sides are shiny, except where I got finger prints on them… I’ve got a lot to learn – what fun!

I messed up the temperature

(Celia’s tempering instructions are crystal clear, but I don’t think I managed to follow them. I thought I’d melt the chocolate in a bain marie, and the temperature soared to over 130 degrees, every lump of chocolate I put in to be the tempering seed bit, melted and disappeared. Ah well, first time, I found a funny little chocolate mould tray that I bought last year, dusted it, and washed it, put some of the melted choc in it, when it got to 88 F, put some sultanas in the rest of it and put those on a tray… )

but the chocolate didn’t scorch or get moisture in it and the chocolate gods forgave me as it was my first time.

Brian says this is much nicer than shop chocolate. He’s well versed in the art of compliments when it comes to sweet things. I used a mixture, you can’t see it properly in the pic, of light and dark buttons and assorted bits of chocolate from my stash.

Every piece of tempering chocolate I put in melted and they were all dark, so I couldn’t rescue any of the pieces, but it just means more chocolate in the final pieces. Thank you Celia for your ongoing inspiration! I feel strangely happy!

And, I was going to say, if I had one of Inawelshgardens’s lavender bath bombs, my joy would be complete.