Yum, Yum, Plum!

Plums are another fruit that we've done lots of August and September baking with. I don't like eating raw plums, but I think that they're great in baking. One thing that I've noticed is that lots of people who tried our plum baking commented that they've never baked with plums before. So if you haven't tried baking with plums before, here are some ideas and recipes to get you started.

Apparently my mom considered naming me Harper Plum! I guess that Plum is a real name that isn't weird in the UK and my mom was looking for a middle name that started with a P to honor her Aunt Patricia. But we don't live in the UK and her friend Renee, who is a nurse whom she works with, told her that she wasn't allowed to name me that because it was super weird and she couldn't be my mom's friend anymore. I think that she was joking about the not being friends part, but I agree that it would have been super weird. Thanks Renee!!!!!!

Our first plum project was a Dimply Plum Cake. Everybody liked this cake, but my brother thought that the plums were hard to cut up. Maybe they'd be better chopped up on top. The other problem with this cake is that it took much longer to bake than the recipe said and we ended up eating it for breakfast at 11. I guess it was more like brunch! I thought that this cake was awesome though.

The plums came out very sweet and juicy.

Plum Blackberry Streusel Pie was my mom's favorite plum dessert and mine too. The streusel topping was delicious and the mixture of plums with blackberries was excellent. We used one of my Grandma Linda's pie dough recipes for the bottom crust and my dad loved it. My mom thought that it was harder to work with than our usual pie dough (which is a different Grandma Linda pie dough recipe), but everyone's reaction was very positive.

The juices run, which makes this pie look very messy, but it's totally worth it.

We also used plums to add flavor to Whole Wheat Muffins. This recipe lets you use any kind of fruit or vegetable and so we used finely chopped plums. These were some of my favorite muffins that we have ever made. We sprinkled a little bit of brown sugar on top which was good. The plums added a little bit of sweetness, but overall these muffins aren't sweet, which we all really liked.

I'm excited to try making these muffins with different fruit. I think that apple or pumpkin would probably be really good!

We doubled the recipe for these muffins, and people might not realize it, but baking frequently requires doing lots of math. Some people think that cooking and baking are more for girls and math and science are more for boys. That's stupid for many reasons, but it's extra stupid because baking and cooking ARE math and science!!!!!

I thought that this was the perfect shirt for baking!

You will never believe what our friend Molly gave us from her mom's garden. If you guessed my BFF rhubarb, you are RIGHT! It was great to be reunited again!!!!! We used it to make a plum rhubarb crisp, but we ran into some problems. We used my Grandma Linda's crisp topping recipe, and that is definitely the best crisp topping that I have ever had. Rachel loved the topping and she loved that there was a good amount of it. But we didn't cut the plum pieces small enough again, so they were hard to eat. And for some reason the rhubarb stayed crunchy. In all of our rhubarb baking, we never had it stay crunchy before, so I'm not sure what we did wrong. But the flavors were good, so I definitely think it would be worth trying to fix next summer.

Crisp isn't pretty, but it definitely tastes good.

And it MUST be served with vanilla ice cream!

The most famous plum recipe we made is also the most famous recipe that the New York Times has ever published! It is a Plum Torte. The recipe was written by a food columnist named Marian Burros and the New York Times has published it every September for more than 35 years. When they tried to stop, there were so many complaints that they had to publish it again! We added vanilla and lemon zest to add a bit of flavor and we all loved it. Rachel said that it was her favorite plum recipe that we made. My mom had thought that a torte meant a cake made with ground nuts instead of flour, but this cake definitely has flour in it. We looked it up and it turns out that there are many definitions. But one definition is a cake cooked in a springform pan, which this cake is. So apparently according to some people, that makes it a torte!

I thought that this torte was one of our prettier plum desserts.

Of course we served it with whipped cream!

We made a couple of recipes that used a mixture of apples and plums. We had never done that before, but it turned out to be a good mixture. One of our recipes was a Single Crust Plum and Apple Pie. This recipe was unusual in a few ways. Most pies that have only one crust have the crust on the bottom and another topping, like meringue or streusel (like the Plum Blackberry Streusel Pie above!). This pie just has the crust on top. Also, most pies are made with sweetened fruit and a barely sweetened crust. This pie has barely sweetened fruit, and a crust that is almost like a sugar cookie.

We had some trouble with this crust, and I was able to solve the problem! The dough was too sticky and I said to add more flour. My mom wasn't sure, but eventually she tried it and I was right! We rolled out the dough perfectly after that!!

This pie turned out to be a HUGE hit! Kelsie said this was the best pie she had ever had!!! She thought that the combination of the fruit and the cookie-like texture of the crust made it incredible. And Chelsea said that she doesn't always like pie crust, but she loved this because it tasted more like a cookie.

I thought that this pie was spectacular! The juice leaked through the crust, but nobody even cared.

This is another dessert that definitely goes well with vanilla ice cream!

Our second plum and apple combination recipe was Magic Apple Plum Cobbler. I wouldn't really call this a cobbler though. To me, a cobbler is supposed to have a biscuit top. This is more like a cake.

First you melt butter and then you pour a cake batter over it and you don't mix it up, even though it looks like a mess that way.

Then you just put the fruit on top and sprinkle with cinnamon sugar.

It doesn't really look very different after it's baked!

We reduced the sugar and served this as a delicious breakfast!

Our last plum recipe was also a breakfast. We made a Plum Clafoutis. My mom thought it was the best clafoutis that we have ever made. I liked the Julia Child clafoutis that we made as part of our Berry Baking Bonanza more, but this one was my second favorite.

First you just slice plums and put them into a cast iron skillet.

Then you pour a batter on top and bake it.

We forgot to take a picture of it before we cut it, but this is what it looked like sliced. We served it with whipped cream.

That is the end of our plum recipes so far, but we did go back to tomatoes! We made a Burst Tomato Galette with Corn and Zucchini. A galette is like a tart, but instead of baking it in a tart pan, you just shape it yourself with your hands. It can also be called a free-form tart. My brother and sister didn't like this recipe so much, but my mom and dad and I thought it was outstanding!

We made our filling on the stove, and then made our dough while the filling cooled.

We put the filling onto the dough, folded up the edges and sprinkled on cheese.

This is what it looked like cooked.

It got a little bit messy once we cut it, but it was still delicious.

We tried an interesting baking experiment recently that would have been a good one for our Mistakes & Mishaps post. There is a restaurant on Nantucket called Topper's that we really like and they serve a delicious brown bread. Brown bread is a bread that is made with whole grain flours and usually flavored with molasses and raisins and was traditionally cooked by steaming in an old coffee can. We found a recipe for the Topper's Brown Bread online and were very excited to try it! My mom bought coffee cans just to bake the bread in. But when we tried it, it was a disaster!! The batter leaked out of the bottom of the cans and spread everywhere. We forgot to take a picture, but trust me, it was an unbelievable mess!!!!

This is what the coffee cans looked like after we were done with them. There was brown bread crusted on the outside because the batter leaked everywhere.

Even though the bread didn't come out properly, what leaked onto the cookie sheet did taste delicious. So we decided to try again, but this time we used the batter to make brown bread muffins. This worked much better and I was really happy that we tried again and didn't give up!

These were delicious, but the molasses flavor is very strong. You'll only like these if you like molasses!

Another fun baking project that we did recently was Oreo Stuffed Funfetti Cookies. To make these, we made a funfetti cookie batter and then wrapped it around vanilla Oreos.

It was fun wrapping these up.

The cookie batter spread out around the Oreo, so the final shape was a little bit funny looking. But these were a huge hit when we shared them with some of our friends at the beach!

Another cookie recipe that we tried recently was Bakery Style Chocolate Chip Cookies. What made this recipe unique is that we made the cookie dough and then let it sit in the fridge for three days before baking. This was supposed to make the flavors come together more intensely. We liked these cookies, but didn't think that they were all that different from other good chocolate chip cookies. My sister said that she thought that they were delicious. My dad said that they were in the top quartile of chocolate chip cookies that he has eaten in his life. That means that he thought that they were in the top 25%. That's good, but I want to bake cookies that he says are the very best ones! So I guess we have to keep trying!!

I really liked these cookies and thought that they looked perfect.

Another fun project that we did was Brown Butter Peanut Butter No Churn Ice Cream. My Aunt Meggie suggested that we make ice cream a while back. We don't do it very often though because my mom thinks that it's kind of a pain to deal with the freezer bowl and the churning. We were skeptical about this no churn recipe, but it turned out to be amazing! Alec said that he maybe liked the texture of this even more than regular ice cream because it seemed creamier. We can't wait to try more variations. Next time we make this kind though, we're definitely going to swirl chocolate into it!

This is super easy to make and then you just freeze it in a loaf pan.

Once we let it soften a bit, it scooped really nicely.

We served it over a Skillet Brownie. Skillet brownies are just like skillet cookies. It's basically just a big brownie cooked in a cast iron skillet and then served soft and gooey.

This picture isn't very pretty, but the cold ice cream melting into the warm brownie was amazing.

We forgot to take a picture when it first came out of the oven. But we let the leftover brownie cool and then cut it up and served it as regular brownies later. They were very fudgy and popular.

Another thing that we did with our ice cream was make ice cream sandwiches. This was Rachel's idea. We took our chocolate chip cookies and sandwiched ice cream into them and then wrapped them tightly in plastic wrap and froze them. These were awesome.

We've also made a lot of cupcakes lately. We made our favorite Vanilla Cupcakes that we have made before. But this time we decorated them differently. We tried to color our icing three different shades of pink. Unfortunately our medium pink and our light pink ended up too close to each other. But I still think that it was a good idea.

Do you see what I mean about how the medium and light icing colors are too close to each other? I want to try the idea again some time though!

We also made some new cupcakes. We made Birthday Cupcakes for our friend Layssa's birthday. They were vanilla with chocolate frosting. My mom liked our usual vanilla frosting more, but my sister liked the chocolate better. I like both!

We made a huge mess dropping sprinkles everywhere when we tried to decorate these! But we got to stay up late on a school night making them and it was fun. My mom even squirted a little bit of frosting into our mouths from the piping bag when we were finished!!

We also made Confetti Sprinkle Cupcakes and they were delicious. I thought that they were the prettiest ones that we have made.

We tried to swirl a mix of purple and white frosting. It didn't work perfectly, but I still thought that they looked great.

Then for my mom's birthday, we made funfetti cupcakes again when she was at work to surprise her! This time we used a Funfetti Cake recipe with Rachel and just turned it into cupcakes. My mom loved these and so did we.

We used different piping tips to make different designs.

The funfetti colors in these were great!

Then we also surprised her with Rice Pudding. My mom loves rice pudding and she said that this was the best rice pudding that she had ever had!!!! She even said that sometimes moms say stuff like that to their kids just to make them feel good, but that she really meant it! This rice pudding was AMAZING. We used a vanilla bean in it and I think that gave it incredible flavor.

Rice pudding might not look very special, but it really is. And you can see all the specks of vanilla bean in this!

One of the many lessons that we have learned from all of our quarantine cooking, is that we really enjoy baking with cornmeal. It adds great flavor and texture to recipes. One of my favorite cornmeal recipes was Cornmeal Cookies. They might sound strange, but they were soft and sweet and fantastic. We just told some of our friends who are picky eaters that they were sugar cookies, and they loved them!

You can sort of see the texture that the cornmeal adds.

Another big hit was Blackberry Cornmeal Muffins. This recipe calls for flax eggs to make it vegan, but we just used regular eggs and they worked great. My mom really loved these muffins. She pretty much loves anything baked with cornmeal. And I do too!

The recipe calls for blackberries and that's what we used, but I bet that these would be great with any fruit. I'll experiment and let you know!

And now, here is the moment that you have all been waiting for!!!! I'm sure that you have been anxiously awaiting our big pancake reveal. None of the guesses were correct, so I guess I'll just have to mail the prize treats to myself! But the pancakes were... Strawberry Cornmeal Griddle Cakes! And we did make them again to take a picture!

I thought that these pancakes were light and fluffy and perfect!

Believe it or not, we STILL have more summer cooking and baking to catch you up on. But hopefully after one or two more posts, we'll be all caught up and ready for fall. I'm very excited for fall baking. Get ready to hear about a lot of apple and pumpkin recipes coming up soon!!!!!