Falling off the tree

I've meant to post about this for a while but just didn't get round to it. Remember last year there was a glut of cherry plums around my neck of the woods? Well, same thing again this year. Although I did have to be a little bit organised. Fruit seems to have come early this year, so I had to deal with the plums before going to France. No way was I letting this slip under my nose, I'd just started my last jar from the 2009 bounty! And you know what? It was dead simple.

All I had to do was shake some branches. It all came crashing down. All those little ripe cherry plums, begging to be taken home. I couldn't leave them to rot could I?! Everyone else seems to not care about them, second year in a row now and I'm still the only one picking them. So want to guess how many pots of jam I made with 2.6kg of stoned and halved cherry plums?

Ten would you believe it?! I know one's missing from that photo, it's already on the go in the fridge!

Cherry plums!

We were invited to my boyfriend's sister saturday night for dinner, and I offered to make pudding. So yes, you'll have guessed from the title of this post that I made cherry plum tart again! However, I made little tweeks to the recipe to get it up to scratch. Basically last time I made it, Boyfriend didn't find it sweet enough. I quite liked it as it was, but I guess for anyone else, it might not have been quite right. Here's the recipe that I used:

1) use shortcrust pastry, roll it out to the size of your dish (I used a fluted tart dish), cover with greaseproof paper and baking beans, and bake blind for 10min at 190C. Remove the paper and beans and put back in the oven for another 5min.

2) while the pastry cools, prepare the cherry plums. Wash, cut in half and remove the stones. Put to one side.

3) put mascarpone in the tart. You want it to come up to 2/3 of your dish.

4) place the plums on the mascarpone, cut face down. Place as many as you can without overlapping them.

5) brush some warmed up cherry plum jam on the top (i'm sure other jams will do, such as apricot).

6) place in the oven at 180C for 20min

This is best left to cool and eaten the next day. As I said, this is the version that I made last week which wasn't really sweet. What I did this time was mix some icing sugar in with the mascarpone, about a couple of table spoons, and also added a drizzle of honey on the top. For some reason, this meant that I had to cook the tart for an extra 10min. Anyway, it was a success and everyone liked it!! I'm afraid I didn't have time to take a photo, but we did finish the evening with some of these little beauties ;-)