Cooking Adventures: Drunken Damsons with Chocolate

As promised, here is the first (of many hopefully!) baking post I have to share with you. We are pretty much up to our ears with plums at my house, so I thought I would start by making drunken Damsons. Drunken damsons normally come from Damson gin, but since we aren't currently making any of that I had to create my own.

The recipe, which is from the amazing Green and Black's Cookbook calls for:

8 plums, pits removed and cut in half

2 tablespoons water

2 oz sugar

4 tablespoons gin
Sorry, these are all British measurements, so you need a scale to weigh your ingredients with. Put the plums in a saucepan with the sugar and water, and poach them gently for ten minutes. Remove from heat, stir in gin, and leave to cool for 2 hours.

Hints: Since I love poached plums, and they can be a wonderful dessert by themselves or with ice cream, I tripled this recipe and put the leftovers in a mason jar to use later. The most important thing is not to add too much water, because the juices of the fruit come out by poaching anyway. Just use enough so that the sugar doesn't burn initially. My greatest advice is to taste, taste, taste. Fruit is tricky because it can sometimes be under ripe or sour for other reasons. Don't be afraid to add more sugar! My rule is if it doesn't taste good before you cook it, it won't taste good after.

Now for the best part, the chocolate:

3.5 oz sugar

8 medium eggs

18 oz dark chocolate (to save some money I used a bag of regular chocolate chips and then a bar and a half of good quality 80-100% chocolate)

9 oz unsalted Butter (that's 2 and 1/8th sticks)

Damsons

Preheat the oven to 400°F. Butter a 8in shallow pie dish or 8 ramekins.

Whisk together the eggs and sugar until pale and creamy. Melt the chocolate and butter in a heatproof bowl suspended over a saucepan of barely simmering water. Mix the chocolate mixture and the drained fruit into the egg and sugar mixture. Pour into the dish or divide between the ramekins ensuring that there is fruit in each one.

Bake for 12 minutes for the pie dish or 6 minutes for the ramekins, until firm to the touch, but still slightly wobbly. Leave to cool and serve with cream or ice cream.

Hints: Either this recipe lies, or my oven is a little off, or i didn't use a shallow enough dish. I ended up having to cook this for 40 mins before it was done. I would put the timer on for 12 mins and be vigilant about checking it after that. The oven is on pretty hot, so you don't want it to burn!

I reserved some of the plums so I could place them artfully on the top, I think it looks nicer that way.

This could easily serve 10 people, it is so rich!

Let me know if you have any questions about the recipe. Have you been cooking up anything delicious?