Winter Plum Cake

This is ‘winter’ cake in the sense of ‘out-of-season’, or ‘store-cupboard’. To be frank, I’d had a tin of red plums in the cupboard for so long I felt I had either to find a way of using it or chuck it out. I’m glad to say that this was the outcome.

The golden unrefined icing sugar here isn’t an earnest option but a voluptuous necessity: without it, you won’t get an icing of such fudgy beauty, in taste as much as looks.