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Okay, I’ll be blunt. This dimply plum cake was fantastic! The recipe had very few ingredients for a cake.. and I just wasn’t expecting much.  IMO, what really does this cake in is the orange zest.  Its SO flavorful, and the smell is out of this world.  Because of this recipe and my Greek Celebration bread, I’ve realized just how much I love orange zest.  The two items both smelled so divine.

This weeks Tuesdays with Dorie bake-off is for the Dimply Plum Cake, chosen by Michelle of Bake-En.

I brought this to an evening barbecue as the dessert, and most people were just intrigued that there were plums in it.  Everyone agreed that it tasted fantastic.  I served it with cool-whip because I didn’t have time to make whipped cream from scratch.  The BBQ that I thought started at 6pm actually started at 5pm. OOPS! So hubby and I stopped off at the local grocer on our way there.

When I bought the plums and orange at the store, I also picked up some baking powder.  Mine was juuuust over the year mark and I didn’t want this cute cake to fail because my wimpy baking powder would make these heavy, dense plumies rise.   Why risk it?!  The new baking powder did just the trick and the plums rose up beautifully with the honey colored cake poking up from all around them.

I have a kitchen aid 600 mixer and the first step of the recipe is to cream the 5 tablespoons of butter.  The mixing bowl was so large compared to the piddly butter that I wasn’t sure it’d actually cream.  It did just enough of a job to pull of the cake, but next time I’d definitely use my smaller attachment bowl.  When I was buying the ingredients I also planned on picking up the ground cardamom.  No one warns you in childhood that you need to set aside a small dowry for this stuff.  ITS SO EXPENSIVE. I know that saffron ain’t cheap, but I never knew that this stuff was sooooo pricey.  I’ve bought cardamom in the pods plenty of times, but never pre-ground.  I was waaaay to cheap to spend over $15 on a dimply plum cake that I wasn’t even sure would be worth $5, so I decided to grind some cardamom up at home.  This made the cake totally distinctive.  You could tell there was this other flavor looming around and no one that ate the cake could guess what it was. Its subtle yet bold – oxymoron much?  Meaning, it doesn’t smack you in the face until you’ve been chewing for a few seconds, and then its impossible to miss.

This cake also took longer to bake than Ms. Dorie had suggested.  I think that my oven must be cooler than hers because most of her recipes require a little extra baking time to be just right.  Lastly, like many others that made this cake, I just couldn’t fit 8 halved plums on the surface. I could only fit 4.5.  Too bad I had already halved and pitted those other 3.5 plums… It was a good snack