I love
delicately spiced, stewed plums. I used to stew my plums with just a touch of
sugar, but then I discover James Martin’s delicious Spicy Plum Crumble recipe.
So plums at my place tend to get the VIP treatment.
Of course I
don’t always have the ingredients I need so I improvise and that’s what
happened this week when I bought too many plums and needed to do something with
them quickly. Nothing worse than rotting plums ...
I had about
8 small plums which I sliced in half and threw into a saucepan with 2 pieces of
star anise, a few drops of vanilla essence, some grated nutmeg, a tablespoon of
sugar and about 75 mls or so of water. I then just cooked this until the plums
softened, cooled it down and put it in the fridge.
As I said,
I just needed to cook the plums so they didn’t go off but I had no idea what I
was going to do with them.
Came
Saturday and I decided to make some drop scones. You might call them flap
jacks, or pikelets. These were always a treat when I was growing up. There one
of my nostalgia foods. My recipe is
based on the one in the CWA Cook Book. We called them drop scones and so do
they.
Beat 1 egg
with 125 mls of milk (I use skim milk). Add 120 g SR flour (I can’t find that
in Prague so I use 10 g baking powder and 110 g plain flour), and a pinch of
salt. Mix it all together. The CWA recipe includes 2 Tbsp sugar, but I leave
this out because often I like my drop scones with Vegemite (I am an Aussie
after all). Drop spoonfuls of the batter into a medium hot fry pan. When the first side is cooked, flip them and cook the other side. I use a non-stick pan. Sometimes it's hard to judge when they're done. One indicator that the first side is done is when you see air bubbles breaking on top of your drop scones. Make sure the heat isn't too fierce because the bottom will be cooked before the inside.
Half way
through cooking the drop scones I remembered the spicy plums. Out of the
fridge, remove the star anise and plum stones, and attack with stick blender –
result! Delicious, fragrant, spicy plum spread for drop scones.
Perfect for afternoon tea.
Let me know
if you try it …
