Plum Crazy!

So, I've got this disease... no, not a real disease... more of an idiosyncrasy. Like my mother, I've become one who is very annoyed by excessive amounts of anything. This sort of counters my dad's idiosyncratic habit of purchasing anything (even if we don't need it) as long as it's on sale/on clearance/is cheap/is free etc. In the past, this has led me to clear out the fridge of massive amounts of Costco-bought yogurt (by baking with it), get rid of grossly spotted bananas (by baking with them), and using up our hand-picked cherries (by, you guessed it, baking with them).

The title of this blog sort of gives away the big "guess the secret ingredient" but hey, it'd be easy enough to figure out. So, onward ho with the plums...

For my first plum-filled recipe... I opted for a nice Plum Cornmeal Cake. I love, love, love cornmeal. Corndogs are amazing (10x better than regular ol' hot dogs), corn bread is to-die-for and cornmeal pancakes are just plain yum... so this recipe jumped at me and I simply had to whip this up for dessert. The cornmeal makes this cake a little more dense than a simple plum buckle, and also adds a lovely "grittiness" to complement the mushy plum chunks.

Hmmm... after making the Plum Cornmeal Cake, I still had 4 softening plums left over. I decided to make a simple plum crumble. I really just whipped this together on a whim, but here's my estimated recipe:



Plum Crumble

Ingredients
4 plums, diced and tossed with 3 tbsp of sugar
1/2 cup sugar
1/4 + 1/8 cup flour
1/8 cup rolled oats
Pinch of ground cloves
1/4 cup unsalted butter, melted


Method:
1. Divide the diced plums between two buttered ramekins
2. In a separate bowl, combine sugar, flour, oats, cloves and butter; mix well.
3. Sprinkle flour mixture over-top of the plums (do not pat down).
4. Bake at 350F for 30-40mins.

Needless-to-say, my mom was very pleased that I finished up all the softening plums before they reached the "discard-now!" stage. And my dad was more than happy to gobble up a few pieces of cake. My sisters couldn't care less that I'd used up the plums, but they happily ate up their fruits... they're good gals :) Now that the plums are all used up, I'll have to do something about the bag of apples sitting in our pantry... hmm...