Two New Yorkers spend six months 18 months!?! in Bangalore and other places in India.

Wednesday, December 27, 2006

All Hail the Plum Cake

Plum Cake!




America has their fruit cake, sure, but let's face it -- a lot of them are just wretched and they're more a figure of fun than something that everyone actually eats.

I've been lucky enough to have some very good fruitcakes back in the states , so I was excited by Indian Christians' own version of this heavy, heavy treat, the Plum Cake. The cakes started appearing in stores around the 2nd week of December. Selflessly putting our diets on the line, we went through two of the cakes in the days up to Christmas.

The first was small, unfrosted, and rather expensive at 125 rs. Made by the famous Nilgiri's store, it was very dark, fairly moist, and full of little cut-up fruits. It took a little getting used to, but after that I was hooked. Surprisingly, it had the red circle code on it, the Indian symbol for something that's non-vegetarian. Were they using beef suet in this, as in Merrie Olde England? I doubt it, but it's possible I suppose. Or maybe the fact that it probably has a little rum in it make it "non-veg"? This seems more likely.

Our second plum cake, bought at All Saint's for 120 rs., was about the same size but much fancier , with extremely thick almond-flavored fondant frosting on the outside. Don didn't like the frosting at all, but I thought it was kind of fun (there was also a rockhard frosting flower to chomp on). The interior was similar to Nilgiri's, maybe a little lighter tasting.

In both cases, eating the plum cake right before bed caused us to fall asleep so heavily that we could hardly wake up in the morning. It was the Ambien of desserts. Wonderful!

Here's a picture of the plum cake extravaganza at All Saints. Do you think they have enough garlands and cakes? I would like to have a big one right now. (More pix are here.)




For more extensive (and careful) plum cake tasting, check out Bangalore Belly's investigation. And to make your own, here's a recipe that looks as if it would make something very similar to what we kept eating, day after day.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thank you for linking to me!!
Check out my post
on an Indian Christmas.

Anonymous said...

The red circle could be because they might have used eggs in the preparation. (BTW great blog!)

Tripp Hall said...

bpaul,

Yeah, now that you mention it I'm sure that it was eggs that made the cakes non-veg. And thanks . . ..