A couple of weeks ago I was contacted by an old work colleague with the kind offer of plundering her damson tree's in her garden. So initially my thoughts were to store my plunder and make jam, which I have done even having enough to squirrel away for our WI winter sale later in the year, but I wanted to do something different with the small quantity I had leftover.
Well lucky me, as I spotted a tweet by same lady to Nigel Slater, mentioning his chocolate damson cake, so off I went hoping that I had the Nigel Slater recipe in my collection of his cookery books. Fortunately I did, the recipe is in Kitchen Diaries II, his most recent publication to date.
Damsons are one of Nigel's favourite fruits and many of his book's feature recipes using this most English of stone fruits.
The resultant bake is very moist and gooey but also very delicious, ideal served as a dessert either plain or simply with cream. The damsons provide a fruity ripple to the brownie like cake and the cake went down very well with the staff at BBC Radio Lancashire as this was the bake I took into the studio. The slightly sharp damsons contrast beautifully with the rich chocolate flavours.
I am using this bake as my contribution towards Dish of the Month hosted by Farmers Girl kitchen this month.
