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

Plum Hazelnut Frangipane Tart

We recently were wandering around a neighboring town on the weekend. It’s was a horribly rainy and windy day. It was also Saturday which means the farmer’s market was running. My husband and I felt so bad for the vendors who were stuck out there in the cold and rain. There were very few customers and we just happened to walk by on our way elsewhere. One vendor gave my husband a pluot and we decided to buy a couple. I knew I could make something great.

I did some searching and found this plum frangipane tart to make. I did make two substitutions: I used the pluots instead of plums, but these pluots looked exactly like plums to me. I also was out of almonds so I used hazelnuts. By definition, frangipane includes almonds, so I’m calling this hazelnut frangipane. The original recipe also included a recipe for pastry, too, but I just used some I had on hand. Feel free to use whatever pastry you like.

This recipe didn’t say what size tart pan to use. It said to roll out the pastry to fit the pan. Ok, well, I wanted to use my rectangular pan which is about 8” x 11” (it’s 20 x 29 centimeters). A 9” tart pan has a smaller area, so you might not need to use all of the filling. I wasn’t sure how much filling I was supposed to use as there wasn’t a pan size listed, and I have a filling I used more than the original recipe. The recipe said to bake the tart for 20-25 minutes, but I baked mine about 45 minutes before it was golden brown (I actually lost track of time, as I kept adding 5 minutes, then 5 more minutes…) None the less, this tart turned out great. It looks and tastes fantastic, and I love the added sweetness that the hazelnuts bring.

Plum Hazelnut Frangipane Tart

Pastry for a one crust pie

11 tablespoons butter, room temperature

5-1/3 ounces sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla

2 eggs and 1 egg yolk

5-1/3 ounces ground hazelnuts

1-3/4 ounces flour

3-4 plums, thinly sliced

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Have a baking sheet ready.

Roll the pastry about 1/8” thick and line your tart pan with the pastry. I used a 8” x 11” tart pan; you could also use a 9” round tart pan. Set the tart pan on the baking sheet.

In a large mixer bowl, cream the butter and sugar until light, about 4 minutes. Stir in the vanilla. Add the eggs and beat until combined. With the mixer running on low, add the ground hazelnuts and flour. Spread the hazelnut mixture (frangipane) in the pastry-lined tart pan; top with the sliced plums.

Bake until the frangipane is golden brown, about 40 minutes. Cool on a wire rack before serving.

Recipe from Simply Delicious

Johnny Cake Cobblers

This week for Tuesdays with Dorie, we had the choice of making Raspberry Fig Crostata or to make Johnny Cake Cobbler. The crostata seemed a little more complex and I’m not the biggest fan of fresh figs so I opted to make the cobbler. It was easily scalable and I was able to cut down the recipe and make two little cobblers for me and my husband. I won’t post the recipe here, but you can find the recipe fairly easily with a search of the web. Also, make sure you check out the Tuesdays with Dorie site and see how the other bakers fared with these two recipes.

What makes this a Johnny Cake Cobbler is the cornmeal in the cobbler topping. The recipe calls for plums or apricots, but I think you could use just about anything. I used pluots, which were very nice. I cut the recipe in half and used 4 pluots. It seemed like there was too much topping, an opinion that was shared with a number of the other bakers this week. I kind of wished I would have spooned the topping on more thinly; in some spots, my cobbler topping did not bake all the way through. 

I liked the pluots in this cobbler and I liked the sweetness of the cornmeal cobbler topping. Having some of the topping under baked wasn’t ideal, but I did like this recipe. Half of this recipe makes two quite large cobblers, which were a bit too big to eat at once. I think a smaller cobbler (mine were in 8 ounce containers) would be better. Next time, I will just not use quite so much topping.

Recipe from Baking with Julia by Dorie Greenspan

Apple Plum Galette

This week’s Tuesdays with Dorie recipe is the Summer Berry Galette. The hosts for this week are Lisa of Tomato Thymes in the Kitchen and Andrea of The Kitchen Lioness. You can get the complete recipe for the galette on their sites. The original recipe for this galette used a mixture of summer berries, but it really works with any fruit. Check out the Tuesdays with Dorie site to see all of the different variations of this recipe.

I really like these free form tarts! They come together without too much fuss and any problems that you have you can just chalk up to it being “rustic.” I made the dough in the food processor, since that is so much easier. I knew that some of the other bakers were having trouble with the dough being too wet because of the sour cream and water in the dough. My husband suggested using cream cheese instead of sour cream, and that work flawlessly. I also used less water, about 3 tablespoons total. The dough was very sticky tight after I made it, but it was fine after an hour and a half of refrigeration.

I used 2 plums and an apple for my filling, as that’s what I had at home. I love baked apple anything and I figured the plums would pair nicely with the apple. The plums were fairly ripe and juicy, but I didn’t have much trouble with the galette leaking too much juice. I really liked this tart, although the plums were quite tart. The pastry was beautifully flaky, nice and crispy, too. This was a great recipe and I have the other half of the galette dough in the refrigerator ready to make another tart. I wonder what fruit I will use in that one?

Recipe from Baking with Julia by Dorie Greenspan, page 377

Hungarian Shortbread

This week’s Tuesdays with Dorie recipe is Hungarian Shortbread, which is a shortbread layered with jam. The hosts this week are Lynette of 1smallkitchen and Cher of The Not So Exciting Adventures of a Dabbler . You can visit their sites to get the complete recipe and don’t forget to check out the Tuesdays with Dorie site to see the posts from all of the bakers. 

You’re supposed to make a rhubarb jam for this and I had planned on doing that but I didn’t have quite enough rhubarb on hand. Plus we’ve had such bad weather in the Seattle area that I know that finding rhubarb in the store would be difficult. I frequently pick up specialty jams and jellies when I travel, so I figured I would just use something I had on hand. I ended up using plum butter as the filling, and it was excellent!

Since the plum butter wouldn’t be as tart as the rhubarb jam, I cut the sugar back a little bit. I halved this recipe, baking it in a round pan. Grating the frozen dough into the pan gave the shortbread a really interesting texture, and when baked the shortbread is light and crumbly. This is soft in the middle, but has the crispness you expect with shortbread. I really liked this, and I thought it was so good with the plum filling. Baked in a round pan, it makes a special looking dessert!

Recipe from Baking with Julia by Dorie Greenspan, page 327