On Monday night, I went to the Grace Lent meal, I had asked Jonny who was cooking if I could bring anything and he said pudding. I haven’t been doing a lot of baking recently but I am trying to use up last year’s fruit from the plot so thought that something with plums in it would be good. I came across this recipe, which I used as a base.

One of the things that I love about being at this stage in my cooking life, is that I’m happy to experiment, I didn’t have exactly everything I needed for this recipe, my eggs are always mixed sizes and I didn’t have any vanilla bean paste, the right size cake pan and only frozen plums but I am aware of how I like to cook and the original recipe is a one bowl minimal mess type of recipe so I thought I could work with it.

Using an electric whisk, I blended one cup of sugar, with four eggs, one cup of sunflower oil and two teaspoons of vanilla extract. I added the zest of one lemon, two tablespoons of yoghurt, one teaspoon of baking powder and two cups of self raising flour and whisked until I had a smooth batter.

Because I didn’t have the specified 30 x 20 cm (12 x 8 inches) cake tin, so I poured the batter into what I did have which was the next size up 33 x 23 cm (13 x 9 inches). I covered the top of the batter in frozen plum halves (about 20 whole plums) and baked in a pre-heated the over at 190C/Gas Mark 5/375 F for about 40 minutes until a skewer came out clean.

I imagine this would work well with all types of fruit and or a crumble topping on it something like the one used in the rhubarb muffins here would also be good. I’ll let you know if I experiment with it.