Spiced plum cake

Bake it Monday 

Because the house smells great with fresh baking and its always nice to lick the spoon of your creation and share a slice of cake.

Its nice to have some home baking in the house for the week, to feed hungry mouths when they come home from school, having tea and cake with fellow mummies over a play date, or 4 o'clock snacks between lunch and dinner wouldn't be the same without a cookie or two.  

What ever the reason its good to get into the kitchen especially with little ones to give them the practical skills in measuring, mixing and taste as well as satisfaction that they have created and cooked something themselves.

Every 1-2 weeks we will be sharing a cake recipe because we cant share a slice of cake with you and we encourage you to share a slice of your home baking with us and anyone else that links up to this post.  Please show some love to others that put post up,  as linkies only work if you share and i cant think of anything nicer to share that a good slice of cake. 

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To kick off this week lets share all bakes about fruit cake i am re using my post from Monday :  If you have any new bakes or want to recycle an old post go to the link up at the bottom of the post.  

Finally after a sickening pregnancy and not being able to eat sugar due to gestational diabetes, Sophie and i are back in the kitchen, and it is nice being creative with food again with my little head chef.

 We have a lovely big bag of semi dried / moist plums so we thought that we would invent our own cake mix to use some of these up by making a spiced plum cake.

 One of our top tips for cake mix is to really mix the sugar and butter together till it is creamy, pale and fluffy even with the dark brown sugar that we used as you can see in the picture.

Sophie loves to make cakes, whisking eggs, mixing the batter by hand and measuring out ingredients and now she has a better understanding of numbers there is even less for me to do apart from get the ingredients and clean up after, which is handy as now little Ella is keenly watching whats going on and probably cant wait to be weened so she can also lick the spoon at the end.  

Here is our invented recipe which turned out to be a rather nice moist and fluffy cake.

Plums semi dried cut up and soaked in a small amount of orange juice do this first while making the rest of the cake mix.

Cream sugar and butter till light and fluffy

Add flour, baking powder, salt and spices 

Add the eggs one at a time and then yogurt

Add nuts and fruit 

cook at 140c for 1.30 hours or till knife comes out clean in a prick test

350g plums

1-2 tbsp orange juice

200g sugar

200g butter

225g self raising flour

1tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp salt

1/2 tsp ginger, cinnamon, vanilla bean, fresh ground nutmeg

4 eggs

2 heaped tbsp greek plain yogurt

100g pecan nuts

Link up your Fruit cake recipes here