Tuesdays with Dorie: Dimply Plum Cake

Over the years, I've gotten pretty good at basic kitchen chemistry. Although I still can't remember whether fudgier brownies means more eggs or less, or anything that requires specific memorization, I'm getting pretty good at substitutions. I more or less know what effect new ingredients will have on a recipe, and I have a good sense of what will work and what will be a disaster. I can gauge batter texture and tell when it needs more liquid. This confidence can sometimes be overconfidence when I'm not paying attention, or when I have a persistent block against remembering the properties of an ingredient.

In this case, my nemesis is a truth that should be easy to remember after all my bread adventures: Whole wheat flour is more absorbent than white. It eats moisture, andwhen one substitutes it for 1/3 of the flour in a recipe, it's a good idea to add some more. This is what I did not do, and this is why my Dimply Plum Cake (actually made with peaches) was kind of terrible. About ten minutes into the baking, I realized what was going on, and poured a little milk over the top. This saved the top, but the bottom is still more biscuit-like than anything else, and the whole thing is kind of unappetizing. This is why I usually try to make a recipe as directed once before I muck around, but scarcity of ingredients made that tough last night. Maybe I'll make it again, but, to be honest, I got a sense of what it might be like and I think I'd prefer to put my fruit into the Yogurt Cake. Haven't made one of those in a while, actually. Hmm....

Bread Pudding

I haven't written much about this on this blog, as it's not that sexy, but one of my favorite ways to have my dessert is a silky, slidy, homey way, with overtones of vanilla and nutmeg, warm and soft and...well, maybe it is sexy.

I would be such a terrible vegan. I could live without cake, but milkless and eggless would be sad indeed. I love puddings and custards, especially slow-baked, with a little skin on. They're ok flavored (I favor lemon, coffee, caramel, and banana), but I really crave the purity of just a baked egg custard, or if I have as much bread around as I did yesterday, a crusty, squashy bread pudding.

I mixed cubes of the Pane di Genzano and last week's Semolina Raisin Bread, both staled, threw in a few chunks of apple, peach, and plum, and poured a mixture of hot milk, cream, egg, sugar, and vanilla over the whole thing, and baked for an hour and half. And it's perfect.

Sometimes, and custard is one of those times, it's not really necessary to follow every nitpicky step to get a lovely dessert. I was riffing on Dorie Greenspan's apple bread pudding, which involves caramelized apples, apple butter, butter, and a 30-minute soak before baking. I eliminated most of the fuss, (though never the water bath while baking, that really matters), and wound up with slightly leaner though not meaner bread pudding with a layer of delicious dry crusty bits on top.
This isn't to say that the apple bread pudding made as directed is a bad thing, I've made it and it is very very good, just that I like desserts where there's room for simplification, late night throwing together while someone nice is making squid and shrimp pasta. Also, any dessert that has a possibility of qualifying as breakfast is a winner--I almost always like breakfast better than dessert anyway. Far from incidentally, Matt happens to love bread pudding too.

Also, look how thrifty. All that stale bread used, and I think that that apple may honestly have been six months old.