My Mother in Law brought round a bag of plums from her neighbour's garden the other day which was lovely – but left me with the question of what the heck to do with them! I have to admit that I've never cooked or baked with plums before, but it's always good to try something new.
A quick check through all my cook books found a couple of recipes, but in the end I went for plum and cinnamon oat slides from The Delia Collection: Baking. It's quite a simple recipe where you end up baking a flapjack like thing with a layer of plums between two layers of oat mixture. The plums though are mixed with ground cinnamon making them have a lovely, slightly wintery taste.
Things unfortunately didn't turn out quite as nice as I wanted them to. Firstly my oat mixture was a bit too dry, rather than being dough like as the recipe said it should be. Nothing seemed to make it less dry, although after baking things did improve a bit, but it remained a bit too crumbly for my liking. I'd also suggest adding some sugar when you mix the plums with the ground cinnamon as it did still have a slightly tart taste. But, then maybe that was just down to the type of plums I used?
Not perfect, but I'll definitely try again if I'm lucky enough to receive any more plums.
If you're interested the recipe also seems to be available here.
I know everyone raves about Delia, and I like her books as well, but I agree they sometimes need tweaking.
I made my 3 tier wedding cake from a recipe of hers, and had 3 goes at the biggest, bottom tier. The first 2 looked fine but were soggy in the middle, which I only found out when trying to get them out of the tins.
We were eating that cake for far too long.
I too find that Delia often needs a little something else. And yes, plums need sugar when they’re cooked. I have no idea what happens in the heating process but they can often be like sucking a lemon!
Glad to see I’m not the only one who think’s Delia is lacking a bit here. If I get another batch of plums I’ll experiment and post back with my results!