Oven-Roasted Plum Cakes

This week’s Tuesdays with Dorie recipe is for oven-roasted plum cakes. The original recipe makes 12 small cakes, which calls for 12 8-ounce baking dishes. I didn’t have dishes of the right size, so I wasn’t sure exactly what I was going to do. I was out shopping with a friend and I came across a set of 4 square baking dishes that were the right size so I picked them up. Other Tuesdays with Dorie bakers asked about making one large cake, so I expect a lot of variations for this week’s recipe. Make sure you check out the links from other bakers on the Tuesdays with Dorie site.

Obviously, I only made 4 cakes, since that’s how many pans I had. I made a half recipe of the batter, and just had extra. Sometimes when you cut a recipe down too much, it just doesn’t work as well. This recipe is a bit unusual, in that you only use 2 tablespoons of batter for each cake. When I was assembling the cakes, 2 tablespoons just didn’t seem like enough. While the cake did puff up, I think that I would have preferred more cake. Maybe it would have been different with a differently shaped pan?

I baked these up and they looked nice. Not the fanciest dessert, but that’s ok. They are mainly plum and just a little bit of cake, so you can pretend that they are healthy! I think that next time I would just add more cake batter, as I liked the plum and liked what cake there was. At least my new dishes worked out ok!

Recipe from Baking with Julia by Dorie Greenspan, pages 255-256