The first step towards making the Smitten Kitchen Purple Plum Torte is to remember that you can make the Smitten Kitchen Purple Plum Torte. Say, midway through Sunday brunch, when you remember that you’ve accepted a dinner invitation for that evening and really should bring something, but nothing too complicated. You think of the recipe as the Smitten Kitchen Purple Plum Torte even though it was first published in The New York Times because you cancelled your Times subscription when they hired Bret Stephens.
For all the good that seems to have done.
Anyway the Smitten Kitchen Purple Plum Torte is perfect for a last-minute dessert because its ingredient list is so simple, you can run it down almost in your head and compare against what you know you have back in the kitchen at home. You’ll just have to make a detour on the way back from brunch to pick up some plums.
Oh, well, and eggs. Dammit.
The second step, then, is making the detour for groceries, and discovering that the pan-Asian grocery midway between brunch and your apartment has not one but two types of plums in the produce section, so you buy some red ones and some golden ones. They don’t have to be perfectly ripe, or even perfectly presentable. They’ll bake into colorful mush surrounded by juice-soaked cake. Pick out a pound or so of each color.
Grit your teeth and add a half dozen organic eggs, priced at fully $1.50 an egg, to your basket. Then carry on home.
When you get home, preheat the oven to 350°F.
Wash the plums and pit them, maybe cut them into quarters. It’s some nice manual work to do while you compose the five bullet points you have to email in on Monday morning, describing what you did at work last week to someone who doesn’t have the inclination or clearance or to actually understand what you do for work.
Pile the washed, pitted plums in a strainer in the sink, and leave them there for the time being.
Next, make the batter. Soften a stick of butter in the microwave, because who has time to wait for butter to soften to room temperature? Put a cup of sugar In a midsize mixing bowl and beat in the softened butter with a fork, until it’s well combined — nominally it should be fluffy, but it’s okay if you don’t have that kind of forearm stamina.
Beat in $3.00 worth of eggs, one at a time.
Mix in a cup of flour — all-purpose unbleached is just fine — and a teaspoon of baking powder. No, wait, soda. Check the recipe again. Okay, yes, right, it’s baking powder. Stir until you don’t see any dry material, scraping down the sides of the bowl.
Grease a pie tin, or a round cake pan, or a tart pan with a reasonably deep rim, or a springform pan. Pour in the batter, and spread it around to more or less even depth. It’ll rise as it bakes, but you can set it on a cookie sheet in the oven to catch any drips.
Retrieve your plums from the sink, and plop them into the batter. Alternate the colors for a pretty pattern. Discover that you haven’t spaced them correctly and shuffle them to get a nice red-gold arrangement. Don’t worry too much about moving the batter around, it’ll all resettle as it bakes anyway.
Make sure you catch any inventory stickers still attached to the plums. Squint at the fine print on one of them to find the origin statement. Apparently we import plums from Chile? Guess you’d better enjoy them while we still do that. Eat a couple slices that didn’t fit in the pan, you’re better off with too many plums for the torte than not enough.
Dust the plums and batter with cinnamon and some more sugar. Don’t skimp.
Put the whole shebang into the oven on a cookie sheet. There’s gonna be a few drips, those plums are juicy.
Bake for 50 minutes, and try not to doomscroll while you wait. At least read some long-form hard news, not another thirty pages of commentary. The New Yorker has a piece about all the scientific research that’s being canceled, and another about the firing of US Forest Service staff who protect nature and fight wildfires, and an analysis about the legality of deportation for political speech, and an interview about all the lifesaving international aid that is no longer saving lives. Think for a bit about what the opposite of saving lives would have to be.
Check the torte by sliding a knife into the cake that bubbles up around the plums. If the knife is more or less clean, it’s done, you can take it out of the oven. There are indeed a few drips on the cookie sheet. The torte is not exactly pretty but it’s golden brown and sparkling with almost-caramelized sugar, and it smells lovely.
Let the cake sit out to cool the rest of the afternoon, then wrap it in foil to bring with you to the dinner party. Pick up a quart of good vanilla ice cream on the way.
Enjoy dinner with your friends. Find out how they’re holding up. Compare notes on your calls to Congress, and whether you’ve heard about upcoming protests that might get some attention. Wonder how much worse things will get.
Clear the dinner dishes and slice the torte. It won’t come out of the pan neatly, but you can spoon piles of baked plum and plum-soaked cake onto dessert plates. Add a scoop or two of ice cream on the side.
Discover, together, how the plums and cake have baked together. They’re probably a bit tart, especially if the plums weren’t quite ripe. But some tartness should go well with the sugar-crusted cake and the ice cream.
As you finish and clear the table, make sure to make plans to do this again soon.
