We were talking about plums, and that led to Eric baking a plum cake. And that led to me also baking a plum cake, because Eric’s was going to be yummy but not the kind of plum cake that I was craving.

I want my fruit cakes to have lots of big, luscious, juicy chunks of fruit in them. A cake should have enough batter to give it some structural integrity, but not much more – there should ideally be more fruit than cake. Quite often I decide that the amount of fruit in the recipe is ridiculously small and double it.

So we had two plum cakes, and it was interesting to see just how different they could be. Eric’s was like a loaf of banana bread but with plums instead of bananas: spicy, very moist, but with no clear plum flavour. Mine was dense, heavy, and with distinct pieces of plum.

Mine also had half a cup of sweet plum wine in it. (The recipe called for madeira, probably because most people don’t have plum wine at home…) Adrian tried the batter before I added the wine, and then the finished cake, and said the wine totally destroyed the cake. Eric and I thought it was the best batter ever.

Upside down plum cake (Swedish)