Hungarian Plum Cake

1/2 cup butter

1 cup sugar

2 eggs

1 cup flour

1 teaspoon baking powder

pinch salt

1/2 teaspoon genuine almond extract

1 quart Italian prune plums

1 teaspoon cinnamon

Cream the butter until light and fluffy.  Add 1/2 cup of sugar and cream together thoroughly.  Add eggs one at a time and beat until mixture is light.  Sift together the flour, baking powder and salt.  Stir into the butter/egg mixture until well-blended.  Stir in almond extract.  Spread the batter into a deep, buttered, square pan.  Cut the plums into halves, lengthwise, remove the pits and place the halves–skin-side down–in rows over the batter, pressing them slightly into the dough.  Combine cinnamon with the remaining 1/2 cup of sugar and sprinkle over top of the cake.  Bake in a preheated 350 degree oven for about 30 minutes.  Cut into squares and serve with whipped cream or–my recommendation–high quality vanilla ice cream.

Notes: I tripled the recipe for the Children’s Services meeting last Tuesday.  Usually I double it and bake it in a 9×13″ dish.  Italian prune plums have a woefully short season.  You can find them for about two weeks every Autumn. (I actually made the cake ahead of time and froze it, when it dawned on me that the plums wouldn’t be available the night before the meeting…)  I have tried making the cake substituting small Bosc pears. I cut them in half, lengthwise, cored them, and alternated the necks and rounded bottoms to fit them into the pan.  I used 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon and 1/2 teaspoon allspice with the sugar in the topping.  It was pretty good, but not as good as with the plums.  Use butter, not margarine!  Use real almond extract, not imitation! (I hate it when people don’t follow the recipe and them blame me because it doesn’t taste right…)

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