German Food Update: The Great Plum Experiment

     This month I have been experimenting with plums. Why plums you may ask. Well, in my research of German dishes I have found that the German people really love plums in desserts in the same way they love a certain TV show about a talking car. This was a nice coincidence to find because plums happen to be my favorite fruit. I figured this would be perfect; they like plums, I like plums, food gold. I was more than a little surprised to see that my love of a fresh ripe plum does not equate to a love of all plum baked goods.

Plum Tart (Zwetschekuchen)
      I have never ever made a tart of any sort before this one. I have seen tarts many times in the world, but not one with a single kind of fruit. This was an odd recipe in that it had me make a huge amount of crust. I was directed to use a pie plate to press the dough into after it had sat in the fridge for several hours. I ended up not using one quarter of the dough. If I had tried to cram all of the dough into the glass pie plate there would have been about a 1/4" of space to put the plum slices into. I'm pretty sure I left too much in as it is because the crust was almost half of an inch thick. Crust thickness beside, I sliced around 8 plums and placed them in an aesthetically pleasing pattern and baked it as directed. I thought it was odd when the recipe did not have me make any kind of syrup or use an egg wash on the top of the arranged fruit. After baking I was told to add a sprinkling of sugar and then I would be done. Everyone who tasted the tart found the finished crust very tasty, if a bit thick. Everyone commented that the plums were lightly sweet, a bit tart, and a bit sour. I enjoyed the tart, but I am not sure how many other people will. The tasters were split evenly on it. Because I started with an ok recipe, I tried to find an even better replacement. 

Plum Roll (Zwetschgenschnecken)
      The second recipe I wanted to try is a breakfast-roll type of baked good. It is a dough with layers of chopped plum, slivered almonds and plum butter. The recipe made 12 bigger-than-my-fist-sized rolls. The filling was super simple to make, but the dough. . . it's always the dough that gives me problems. The recipe was very similar to a bread or pretzel dough. It was very stretchy and exceptionally sticky. The directions called for me to roll the dough into a 20" x 20" square. That is huge and I found the dough to be way too thin at that size. Since I followed the steps verbatim the first time through, I struggled when it came to rolling the dough into a huge lumpy log. The dough split and was very difficult to work with. After cutting 12 misshapen rolls and loading them into 2 pans and not the 1 called for, I loaded them into the oven. I was amazed at how much the dough had puffed up. My wife really enjoyed how these turned out in the end. The cinnamon really added a flavor she enjoyed. I was indifferent towards these. Second recipe, second lukewarm reception. In general I don't mind making dishes that I know only a few people will like, but I would like to tell people that I like what I made for them.

Plum Cake (Zwetschgenkuchen)
      The last of the 3 plum recipes I found happened to be our favorite one. Thank god, because I don't think I could have convinced my wife to keep eating plum flavored baked goods for much longer. The recipe for the cake base was very odd to me. The base was very thick compared to every other cake recipe I have ever made. It had to be scraped out of the bowl because it was so thick. This recipe had 2 characteristics that drew me to it. It was designed to be used with not-fully-ripe plums, and it didn't include any nutmeg. As anyone who buys fruit ever knows, not every piece of fruit in the store or market stall is ripe at the same time. The sugar content in this recipe was a bit higher than the previous 2 recipes I tried. I believed this helped to balance the tartness and sweetness of the plums I purchased. The lack of nutmeg in this recipe may seem like an odd positive, but when you remember that 4-6 of the other recipes I will be making for TH2 have a detectable nutmeg flavor in them, the change to cinnamon was a positive one. The part of the recipe that threw me off a little was the direction to layer the plums in any pattern you wish. This led me to believe that the pattern I chose would be noticeable after it was finished, but that didn't happen. The cake fluffed up so much during baking that any semblance of a pattern was lost. Next time I make this, the plums will simply be layered in nice, easy straight lines.

      This cake is the final dessert that will be experimented with for Thanksgiving 2.6. This gives me just under 20 different desserts to offer to everyone. I'd like all the guests to be aware that because I am creating so many different items, that there will not be a huge amount of any one item. If you know you want some zimtsterne cookies then you had better get to the gathering while the Parade is still on the video wall (between 11am and 2pm). I am going to try and make the dessert table look fancy-ish this year. I want a few nice pictures of the event this time. Until then, I have one more "birthday day" at work. I have to figure out which side dish I want to try out on my co-workers. I will take suggestions.