Plum cake

Ingredients

• 2 sachets yeast (each sachet has 7g)
• 500g flour
• 220g sugar (Tina usually uses only 120g)
• 250ml milk
• 100g butter
• 2kg plums

Directions

• Mix lukewarm milk with sugar and yeast. Leave for 10 minutes until you see bubbles.
• Mix butter, flour and salt together. Then add the milk-sugar-yeast mix.
• Knead well until dough doesn’t stick to your hands anymore.
• Let the dough rise (approx. 20 mins in the oven at about 35 degrees).
• Then roll dough out on a square tray. Place plums on top.
• Let it rise again (approx. 20 mins in the oven at about 50 degrees).
• Then bake for 25 mins at 175 degrees. If the plums are sour, you can also add some more sugar on top before baking.

Plum cake is originally a Bavarian dish, known as Zwetschgendatschi. It’s spread throughout Germany, where it is often known as Pflaumenkuchen (literally, “plum cake”).

While in Cambridge, Tina and I made use of the Girton orchards a few miles away from Cambridge. There we could help ourselves to all the plums and apples we could carry. In days after a trip to the orchard, our diet switched to mainly plum cake as we ate our way through kilograms of the fruit.