If you love German recipes like this, be sure to also try our German Apple Cake with Streusel and Apple Strudel! Every summer, we find ourselves with loads of plums from our neighbors who have a plum tree that produces like crazy. They are always sharing with anybody who is willing to take plums off their hands, and I happily oblige. Typically we eat them out of hand as fast as we can, but I will often make a galette or cobbler with them too. This year, I decided to make a German plum cake recipe and it’s going to be a new tradition at our house!
A cake by many names
German Plum Cake is known as Pflaumenkuchen, Quetschekuche, Zwetschgenkuchen, or Zwetschgendatschi, depending on what part of Germany you are in. It is traditionally made with seasonal Italian prune plums that come on in Germany each summer. Those plums, also called European or Empress plums, tend to be small and egg shaped, with purple or blue skin and yellow flesh inside and smaller than the plums most of us are familiar with here. One of the things I loved about living in Germany was how much eating seasonally is part of life there and how they celebrate seasons like plum season or white asparagus season this way. I read an article that said that 41% of Germans say plums are their favorite fruit. Even though I didn’t have the traditional Italian prune plums for this cake (they are hard to come by in the U.S.), I made it with the plums I had on hand which, frankly, felt very German anyway to be both practical and resourceful. And it turned out fantastic! In fact, I’m sure you could make this exact same recipe using nectarines, peaches, cherries, strawberries, or other fruit and it would be delicious as well. In some regions of the country, German plum cake is made without streusel on top or with a yeast-based cake on the bottom instead of the version I’m sharing here. Sometimes instead of the streusel the plums are just sprinkled with pearl sugar and that makes for a pretty presentation as well. This streusel-topped version of a plum cake is closest to what we actually enjoyed while living in Frankfurt for our internships during law school and I have never been one to say no to streusel.
Choosing plums for baking
The key is to choose plums that are slightly more firm. If the plum is already super soft, it won’t hold it’s form as well as it bakes. As it is, the layer of juicy, sweet fruit cooks down between a generous amount of crunchy sweet streusel on top and tender cake beneath. It is heavenly with it’s sweet and slightly tart taste that is amplified ever so slightly be a little lemon zest added to the cake batter under the plums. I arranged the sliced plums in concentric circles, which would make for a pretty presentation if there wasn’t streusel on top. Instead, you would just sprinkle it with pearl sugar or coarse sanding sugar. But if you are going the streusel route, which I highly recommend, you could chop up the plums and arrange them with less fussiness since they are going to be covered with streusel anyway. There is no need to peel the plums. Just slice them in half and remove the pit, then quarter them. Sometimes that’s enough depending on how large your plums are, but in my case I sliced them again into eighths and still had substantial pieces of plum for arranging onto the cake batter beneath.
How to make German plum cake
More summer fruit desserts
Strawberry ShortcakeRaspberry Pretzel SaladFresh Fruit PizzaBlackberry Nectarine CrumbleCherry CrispRhubarb CrispPeach CobblerHomemade Blackberry PieFresh Strawberry PieSouthern Peach PiePlum CrispPlum Cobbler
Recipe adapted from Coley Cooks and German Girl in America. Let me know what you thought with a comment and rating below. You can also take a picture and tag me on Instagram @houseofnasheats or share it on the Pinterest pin so I can see.
