Plum Almond Cake

Plum Almond Cake makes for a light, fruity cake that is perfect to serve with coffee, tea or even munch on for breakfast. You wouldn’t know it from how pretty this cake is, but you’d be surprised to hear that two of the ingredients are yogurt and olive oil:)).

Mediterranean Plum Flavors

I grew up in the Mediterranean and we love plums and most fruits really. We enjoy them fresh when seasonal, we add them to cakes and desserts and we preserve them in jams and marmalades. We even dry plums and make a winter hot drink with boiled prunes.

I make this Red Plum Jam anytime I find the plums at a convenient price at end of season.

Please keep in mind that plums have different varieties that change in color, flavor and shape. I used about 5 plums like the ones shown below, but if you were to use let’s say Italian plums, you’d need about 12 of them to make up the volume.

Ingredients & Process

I use a lot of ingredients for this cake, but believe me it’s worth it.

• Dry Ingredients – all purpose flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, powder sugar and pinch of salt
• Wet ingredients – eggs, butter, olive oil, yogurt, lemon juice, vanilla extract, almond extract, orange liquor
• Fruits – chop 2 plums, slice the other 3. Zest 1 lemon.
• Nuts – sliced almonds

Usually as with most cake, I whisk baking powder and baking soda into the all purpose flour. Then I use a hand held mixer and mix eggs, sugar, butter and the extracts together.

Add yogurt, olive oil and lemon juice then slowly add the all purpose flour to create the batter. Incorporate chopped plums and lemon zest into the batter using a spatula.

Pour batter into a springform pan (9 inch diameter). Add brown sugar over sliced plums, then cover the top of the batter with plums. Use a pattern so the cake comes out pretty when baked.

Then add sliced almonds over plums. Bake cake at 350 degrees Fahrenheit (about 180 degrees Celsius) for about an hour. Use the middle rack and if towards the end, you notice the cake is getting too brown on top, cover the cake with aluminum foil for the last 15 minutes.

Let the cake cool down before cutting into and serving. Add powder sugar on top of the cake if desired.

Tips and Notes

I make this cake quite often and what I have realized is that sometimes I don’t have all the ingredients on hand so usually I swap some ingredients.

• If you don’t have olive oil or don’t like to add olive oil to a cake you can replace the olive oil with avocado oil. Or instead of oil, just add half a stick of butter, so in total you’d have 1.5 sticks of butter.
• If you don’t have almond extract, use 2 tbsps of vanilla extract instead of 1.
• You can skip adding almonds on top of the cake if you are allergic to nuts or don’t like almonds. They add flavor and crunch and texture to the cake but you can also skip them if you have issues with almonds.
• Here in US I prefer serving this cake with powdered sugar, most people are familiar with it and like it. But if you are from the Mediterranean, I bet you’re used to cakes covered in syrup too. So feel free to add syrup over the cake if you so like. Let the cake absorb it overnight then serve the next day. I wouldn’t remove the cake from springform if I added syrup.

If you would like to save this recipe for later, please save the below image to your boards in Pinterest. Let me know in comments if you made this cake and you have any questions. If you loved it, I’d appreciate a 5 star rating too. Feel free to tag me your pictures in social media if made this recipe:). Thank you!

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Other Mediterranean Desserts

Feel free to browse some of my other Mediterranean desserts:

• Sour Cream Cookies (Kifle)
• Albanian Baklava (Bakllava)
• Mediterranean Almond Cookies
• Orange Cake
• Apple Honey Cake