Cuisine – Stone fruit season

We’re now enjoying the absolute best of the stone fruit season. Cherries and other small early fruits are all but over, but plums, late nectarines and peaches will be bountiful for a few weeks yet. These are enjoyed best when they’re just picked from the tree, ready to fall, so you can bite through the almost-crisp skin to find the softness within, releasing a stunning amount of fragrant sweet juice. They soften after they are picked, making them perfect for cooking into breakfast and dessert treats.

Plums are my preferred stone fruit for cooking as there’s something about the juice that’s released that makes them rich and satisfying. Even gently stewing those plums and peaches does not sound alluring, so I prefer to roast these fruit and observe their sugar content really develop to intensify the flavour.

To roast stone fruit, simply pop them into a roasting pan with a few flavouring ingredients like a bay leaf or fresh thyme, thin strips of lemon or orange rind and maybe just a small spoonful of sugar or vanilla or maple syrup to bake them gently at 170C until the juices run. It’s important to crowd them in quite tightly into the dish so they remain moist and do not burn at the edges. Store the roasted fruit in a jar and tip all the pan juices over them. This fruit will be perfect to have for breakfast with cereal or yogurt and you will have an easy dessert to serve with some softly whipped cream, Greek yogurt or a combination of both.

I have many recipes for stone fruit tarts and this one is not a true tart, as I have done away with the usual pastry base to make for a fabulous light and easy dessert. Choose a nice dish to cook the dessert in which will be taken directly to the table. An added advantage of doing away with a pastry case is that it makes it gluten free as the delicious filling is made with ground almonds. This is a lovely way to cook autumn fruit too, when you can change the plums out for figs, persimmons, apples and pears. It is also very easily scaled up to use a larger deeper dish with 200g butter, 200g sugar, 3 eggs and 200g ground almonds if you need to serve more people.

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Baked Plums with Frangipane

6-8 ripe free-stone plums
140g butter
140g caster sugar
2 eggs
140g ground almonds
1 tsp vanilla bean paste or vanilla essence

Preheat the oven to 190°C.

Lightly cover the base of your chosen baking dish (24cm diameter) by rubbing with a little extra butter and a sprinkling of ground almonds so that when you add the plums they will not stick to the base.

Cut the plums in half, removing the stones and spread the cut-side down evenly into the baking dish.

Next, make the frangipane. Soften the butter if it is straight from the refrigerator. I find the easiest way to do this is to cut the butter into small chunks, place them in the bowl and cover them with water that is at about hand temperature. The butter will soften very quickly, but be sure to tip all the water away before adding the sugar. Beat the butter and sugar together very well until creamy and fluffy. This is best done with an electric beater.

Add the eggs, one at a time, beating well so they are incorporated. Add the vanilla paste or essence and fold in the ground almonds with a metal spoon so you can cut through the mixture to keep it light and fluffy.

Spoon the frangipane mixture over the plums and place the dish in the oven. Bake for about 40 to 45 minutes until the frangipane sets and turns golden brown. Remove from the oven and serve warm or at room temperature with softly whipped cream, yogurt or ice cream.

Serves 6