Plums

Mondays in August: baskets and armfuls of lush, heady, perfumed fruits. Tuesdays in August: baskets and armfuls of lush, heady, perfumed fruits that should probably get used up pretty soon.

I got a whole lot of those tiny red plums from my CSA, and one of the things I wanted to make was a pound cake. This is very similar to the recipe by Marian Burros that runs almost every year in the New York Times, their periodic threats to suspend the practice notwithstanding. I make it a bit cakeier.

Pound Cake with Plums

½ pound (1 cup) butter at room temperature

½ pound (generous 1 cup) sugar

4 eggs (that’s ½ pound of eggs!)

½ pound (2 cups) flour

two handfuls tiny red plums, other small plums, or blueberries (about ½ pound after you remove the stones)

Butter and flour two six-inch springform pans or one nine- or ten-inch pan. Heat oven to 325 or 350 (350 would probably be better, but I had some slower cakes going at the same time).

This one is easy to mix by hand. Cream the butter and sugar, beat in the eggs, then beat in the flour. Pour and scrape the batter into the prepared pans and arrange the halved plums or berries on top. Bake for about 30 minutes. These cakes need no vanilla or cinnamon or leavening. The butter and eggs shine on their own.

I am still working on a chocolate prune cake. I think I’ll have a blog-worthy recipe for you probably in time for Rosheshone (It is a chocolate honey cake in its current beta-version).

I also made some red plum and cantaloupe smoothies with organic whole-milk buttermilk from Hawthorne Valley farm and a squeeze of wildflower honey. That’s pretty much the whole recipe. The Yiddish word for smoothie is shoymke, which means “foamie” if you translate it literally back into English.

For Sweetnicks. Happy Independence Day to India, a surrogate homeland to all devoted to the pursuit of deliciousness.

antioxidant-rich foods