Granny's Home Bakin'

It's a holiday, you're home from work, it's raining and generally miserable out, and you've no real plans for the day. What to do? Why, embark upon a time-consuming culinary experiment, of course.

While buying groceries on Saturday, I picked up some damsons, which are in season right at the moment. You know, those little purplish-blue plums with tart, yellowish-green flesh? You can usually only buy them between mid-August and early September. They're excellent for cooking, and I have very fond memories of a wonderful plum cake that my Babcia (i.e. my paternal grandmother) used to make. The cake itself has halved damsons baked into it, and it's topped by a sugary butter crumble. Delicious.

So, I rang my mother for the recipie. Of course, my grandmother (like most cooks of her generation) never used written recipies, so my mother just watched what she did one day, estimated as best she could, and wrote everything down. She and I talked over the method on the phone - I had forgotten that this cake is yeast-based, which was rather unnerving. Nonethless, I picked up some yeast this morning and decided to have a go at the recipie. I've never worked with yeast before, but luckily I had A. on hand to offer technical advice (he was a dab hand at bread-making in his youth).

Well...it took forever, but the results were very good, if I do say so myself. The cake dough itself required FOUR risings, at over an hour each time. I started the first rise at 1.30 pm, and the cake wasn't ready to put into the oven until 7.30 pm! Honestly, people just can't make stuff like this unless they're at home all day.


The trick with time-consuming stuff like this, of course, is to bake in bulk - which my grandmother did. I actually reduced the quantities in her original recipie by 80 percent! She would make 5 or 6 of these cakes at a time, then put them in the freezer (they freeze beautifully) so she could whip one out whenever company came round. Even the one cake above is huge - I put three-quarters of it in the freezer tonight, to eat later.

Herewith the recipie - despite my inexperience, it turned out deliciously well!

Babcia's Yeast Cake
(yields 5 big honkin' casserole-dish-sized cakes, so you better own a freezer or have a lot of friends)

Melt ¾ pound sweet (i.e. unsalted) butter with 2.5 cups sugar and 3 cups milk. Then dissolve 5 packets of yeast in ½ cup warm water; add 1 tsp. sugar to this mixture.

In a large bowl, mix the butter/sugar/milk mixture with 12 egg yolks and 4 whole eggs, the yeast, 4 tsp. of vanilla and about 5 lbs. flour "until it feels right" (?!?!). Knead until the dough comes off in your hands.*

Rub top of dough with some oil, cover, and put aside to rise. Allow to rise 3 times in total, punching the dough down after each rising.

Put dough in chosen pan/dish. Wash and split plums (raisins can be used if plums are out of season). Arrange on top of dough, skin sides down. Let dough rise for a 4th time.

Make crumble topping by blending together sweet butter, flour and sugar. Sprinkle generously over top of cake.

Bake at 300 degrees F for 25-30 minutes.

*Here I must admit to a heresy - I used the food processor. I put the flour in first, then added the butter mixture, eggs, vanilla and yeast, and blended for about a minute and a half. Then I turned it out and as the dough was still very sticky, I ended up having to add almost another cupful of flour and knead until it "felt right" and the dough started coming off my hands.