Pistachio-Plum Crisp by Alison Roman

I like pistachios, and I really like plums. Sadly, I didn’t care for this dessert. 

The pistachio topping was a little too wet and the pistachio flavor too overpowering. The plums became nice and jammy, but their flavor was too sweet for me. It needed to rely on the natural sugar more, and added sugar less. Normally with a fruity dessert, I’d say layer on the ice cream, but that would have made an already overly sweet dessert even sweeter. 

The assembly is rather simple, like any fruit cobbler. The fruit is tossed with corn starch, sugar, and your acid of choice. The topping consists of butter, flour, sugar, spices, and nuts, then gets scattered on top of the fruit to bake. I love simplicity, but I’d prefer to use my plums differently.

Next plum season, I’ll opt for just making Alison’s Torn Plum Browned Butter Cake like five times in a row. That cake is incredible. Seriously, go make it.

132 recipes cooked, 93 to go.

Torn Plum Browned-Butter Cake by Alison Roman

I’ve loved every single one of Alison’s desserts. But this cake, in a neck-and-neck tie with Alison’s Key Lime Pie, wins the Gold Medal. Impossibly buttery, dense but not heavy, bursting with sweet juicy plums, and sprinkled with crunchy sugar. When it comes to describing food, I try to avoid terms like “guilty pleasure,” but I’m not sure how else to talk about eating this cake. It was so perfectly rich that it felt… sinful? No, heavenly? Let’s go with heavenly. 

Flavor besides, the effort required is minimal. It starts with greasing a 9-inch cake pan. Then, melting butter (there’s a LOT of butter – 1.5 sticks to be exact!) in a small pot until it starts to brown. This took about 6 minutes for me. Then I let it cool. 

In the meantime, I whisked the dry ingredients including powdered sugar, salt, GF All-purpose flour, almond flour, and Xanthan Gum. Then I added and whisked in 5 egg whites and maple syrup, (I was out of honey), until there were no lumps to be found. Once the butter cooled, I folded that into the batter as gently as possible before pouring the batter into the cake pan. 

I loved tearing the plums with my hands instead of using a knife. Call it childish, but playing wtih your food is a lot of fun. I made sure to choose really ripe plums at the store for maximum sweetness and ease of tear. I plopped (yes, plopped) the plum bits onto the batter and sprinkled everything with demerara sugar. The cake baked for 42 minutes, with one rotation at the 20 minute mark. The key to done-ness was the deeply browned edges, which ended up being my favorite part. And oh, it was heavenly. 

106 recipes cooked, 119 to go.