This recipe is an adaptation of the Fresh Plum Cake recipe in The Baking Bites Cookbook (a great gift for Mother’s Day, to all you last-minute shoppers!). It is a very simple cake, with a vanilla-scented cake batter supporting lots of fresh, juicy plums. It is beautiful to look at (you’ll have to check out the photo in the book), too. But as I’ve always said, it never hurts to mix things up a little bit, so I decided to make a chocolate variation on that cake.This cake is meant to showcase fresh plums, so even though the cake is chocolate, it only has a light chocolate flavor to it and doesn’t overpower the fruit at all. In fact, the cake tastes richer and more complex where it meets with the plums and has fruit juice running into it. I like the way that this cake rises up well around the plums during baking for a lovely presentation to the finished cake. I always sprinkle the top of this cake with a bit of coarse sugar before putting it into the oven. It adds a little bit of extra sweetness to the fruit, and a hint of crunch to the top of the cake.
The plums look fantastic when you slice into them because I leave the skins on in this recipe. Plums have very thin skins that are not tough after baking. Leaving the skins on allows a brilliant purple-red color to stain the otherwise pale peach-colored flesh of the plums. For an even more vibrant color, look for plums that have a naturally red flesh and use them in this cake instead!
