Plum, Plums, Plums....plum jam, plum crumble & oh yeah banana cake!

A plethora of plums or maybe a glut of plums found themselves marooned in my kitchen on the bench yesterday. My father in law picked these beauties from his tree and kindly delivered four bags to our house.

What to do, what to do....? Plum jam anyone? Yes please was the resounding reply from the family. I hunted down a recipe from taste.com.au  I read all the reviews and decided that this was the easiest recipe for me to make. You see I've never made jam before ever. I have pickled beetroot and made lemon butter but never made jam. How hard can it be? I've always been put off thinking it was hard.  Well I'm here to inform you it's not hard at all. I found the recipe easy to follow. I used only one kg of sugar instead of the amount in the recipe after reading the reviews.

Here are some of the plums washed and waiting to be chopped.

Cooking on the stove!

All bottled up.......yes twelve and half jars. After I made one batch and it worked out so well I made another batch, well I had all these jars to fill you see....

That was two bags of plums down two more to go. I needed culinary inspiration. Off to the computer and a visit to Lorraine from a fabulous blog I like   Not Quite Nigella  .   What do you know a recipe, plum and pear crumble. Click on the highlighted writing and it will take you to the the recipe and Lorraine's delicious blog. Well mine is minus the pear but I decided that I could live with that. I mean we didn't have  pears anyway.

How delicious does that look? I absolutely love apple crumble so I thought why not plum crumble.

Now when you eat apple crumble you just have to have it with vanilla ice cream. This is just my opinion! So it makes sense that plum crumble and ice cream would be equally delicious. Minor disaster, no disaster  of epic proportions, we were out of ice cream! Luckily I discovered this before the plum crumble went into the oven. I promptly dispatched hubby and my beautiful girl to purchase said ice cream....crisis averted. A bit hard to see vanilla ice cream in a white bowl, but trust me it's there. Oh My Goodness this was so yummy. My mouth is watering just looking at the pictures. What a shame there is half left, we'll just have to have it again tomorrow night, such a hard ship, how will we ever cope? lol

So that's three bags of plums gone, one left. Well that one bag can wait until tomorrow.  I think I'll make up some more of the stewed plums for plum crumble and freeze it in portions.....that way we get to enjoy a few more plum crumbles.......lucky us!!!!! My hubby wants me to make up more jam, um no I will not. Plum crumble is a winner.

And just because I can, well more to the point because we had  six bananas that were looking "a bit thanks for coming" two banana cakes were whipped up. Not to mention we needed some snacks for lunch boxes and to have with a cuppa for morning tea.

So what did you get up to this fine day?
Have a tremendous day.
Cheers Donna

Baking Day

It's been a very productive day in the kitchen today. I have been busy baking so we have lots of snacks. Were you aware that teenage boys are always hungry? I'm sure mother's of boys the world over will be nodding their heads saying YES! I should nick name my son 18, "Grazer" lol. Well it's not something new to me as he's been like this for many years now. My gorgeous daughter made a cake yesterday for us all to enjoy, well it's all gone....this delicious cake did not even last 24 hours. I did have a slice yesterday and one today, so to be fair I have eaten some too but not all of it! It was very tasty, so a great compliment to my girl. This situation needed to be rectified immediately. I thought  how about I make more than one thing, that way it may last more than 24 hours. Well that's my line of thinking anyway.

Here's the haul.....

We have the muesli bar slice in the top box. We love this slice we have it a lot. I got the recipe here from Wendy's blog, My Abundant Life. I changed the recipe slightly as I did not have some of the ingredients I usually have. I used golden syrup instead of honey. I really liked this change, although when I have made it with the honey I like that too! Instead of using the cereal/rolled oats I  used some muesli I had bought for my daughter that she wasn't keen on. OMG this is delicious. My daughter and I did some quality control tests on the slice after it had cooled....yes some tests, so more than 1 slice was consumed.....we couldn't unleash this on my son and hubby unless it passed our strict quality control testing. FYI it passed, damn we'll have to share.

Next on the cooking production line were these scrumptious Cranberry Hooty Creek biscuits. This recipe was also found on Wendy's blog. These are another favourite in our house.

 And lastly we have this delicious coconut cake. My daughter has this recipe written in her little cook book where she writes down her favourite recipes. She can't remember where she found or saw this recipe. She has made it quite a few times and we love it. I have never made it before and was most surprised to find that there are no butter or eggs in this recipe. It's just a cup of coconut, a cup of milk, a cup of caster sugar and a cup of self raising flour. That's  it, very simple.

Hopefully today's  baking session will last us for longer than 24 hours. I really enjoyed my baking session today. My gorgeous girl was more than happy to sit and chat with me while I was doing the cooking. We just chatted about heaps of stuff, it was so lovely. She even dried the dishes for me after I had washed up, what a sweetheart. 

So how long do your baking  efforts last in your house?

Have a fabi day. 

Cheers Donna