CINNAMON BAKED PLUMS and a biscuit discovery!

In return for some courgettes and tomatoes, my friend Sally gave me a huge bag of plums the other day.  Our own plum trees have had hardly any fruit on them since the bumper crop a few years ago and we do love plums so I was very grateful!

Knowing what to do with so many at once was a head scratcher.  We were expecting visitors but they have  a long list of things they don’t like.  Plums are on the list (as are courgettes and tomatoes).  So with a need for baking but not with plums I had to do something to preserve them for our own use later.

Cooked plums take up less room in the freezer than whole ones so I decided to roast them.  We sat for a while at a shady table in the garden to halve them and remove all of the stones.  This was a bit fiddly but worth the trouble; the plums were at various stages of ripeness so some of the stones were easier to remove than others.

I then simply spread them in a single layer in roasting tins, sprinkled with demerara sugar and a dusting of ground cinnamon.  I baked them at 180° fan for 20 minutes by which time they were nice and soft and sticky.  We had some on our breakfast cereal and some with ice cream and a mini stroopwafel  The rest went into the freezer for future enjoyment.

Stroopwafels - where have they been all my life?  I had never heard of them until I spotted them in a French discount store called "Action". They are delicious little wafer sandwich biscuits with a caramel filling.  Utterly divine and wickedly sweet but luckily the mini version is not too detrimental to the waistline - as long you don’t eat too many!  They go perfectly with ice cream, fruit salad and Sally's delicious plums!