Plum Cake - Eats Well with Custard



I came home with some freshly picked plums today and have made them into a cake to take into work tomorrow. Well more accurately I will be taking in what I have not already eaten for supper tonight.

The plums seemed too small to be Victoria plums, and also not as sweet as I think a Victoria would be, but they looked very much like them. Nonetheless they have made a very nice 'plain cake'. I love that expression, 'plain cake', I think it was used a lot more when I was a child, less so now. I wonder if it was used to reflect more the cost of the ingredients, higher ratios of cheaper flour and sugar and less of the more expensive butter and eggs thus giving a plain cake as opposed to a 'fancy' one. 'Eats Well With', however, is a bit of a new phrase that I first associated with Gary Rhodes though he may not have invented it. I suspect it trashes all the grammar rules as well as sounding a bit odd, so language purists please forgive me this once.

The recipe for this cake is taken almost exactly from one that appeared on  Dom's blog Belleau Kitchen last year. Please head over to mum makes a victoria plum cake to get the full recipe. My only change was to add yogurt instead of milk to the cake mix and to sprinkle the top with flaked almonds, oh, and to use a square tin.
 

I have quite a passion for custard, so many of my cakes and puddings are adorned with it and in this case it certainly suits the plain cake theme. Most of the time I will use a tin of cold bought custard. You may be feeling rather horrified at this point but custard lovers the world over will understand the attraction. Custard is nearly always instead of cream in my bowl. Ice-cream comes next as it is really just frozen custard after all, and then yogurt and then cream. Unless it is christmas pudding and then it has to be rum sauce (never rum butter). Dwelling on custard as I am, can anyone explain to me why those pots of 'fresh' custard from supermarkets have so much (too much) cream in them?

So here is the whole beauty, and unless I get the mega munchies later there should be plenty for folks at work.