Gâteau aux pruneaux

Yesterday I went down to the garage to look for my silicone savarin mould (Br.) / pan (U.S.) — we have a cabinet full of kitchen things down there. They're things we don't use very often. I think I'm going to start using the savarin (Fr.) / bundt (U.S.) pan more often.

A few days I bought a kilo bag of pruneaux d'Agen — prunes from the Agen area in SW France — at the supermarket. So I thought about a prune cake recipe that I used to make and always liked. It was time to make prune cake again.

It just dawned on me that I also have a package of dried apricots down in the pantry. I bought those when I bought the prunes. Now I wish I had made an apricot cake. Oh well... next time. Now that the moule à savarin is back in the kitchen, I'll make more cakes.

I did a whole post about making this kind of prune cake in 2008. I just found it by doing a search on the blog. If you've never done a search, just type a keyword ("prunes" for example) in the search field (with a magnifying glass icon) at the top left-hand corner of the main blog screen. Try it.

The secret to making the prune cake successfully is to cook it in a ring pan. It cooks evenly. In a loaf pan, it's hard to get the inside to cook through without burning the outside of the cake. If you don't have a ring pan, use a wide cake pan and cook the batter in a thin layer (or two thin cakes for this amount of batter).

Notes: If the prunes you have are as tender and moist as the ones I bought, you really don't need to soak them before making the cake. Also, I added 1½ teaspoons of baking powder to the French recipe, to make the cake rise well, and I beat the egg whites just lightly before adding them to the batter — which means the cake is easier to make.