This was a good year for plums in the garden, both for the yellow plums and for the Italian prunes - enough so that it took some doing to figure out what to do with them all. Since I'm not in a hurry to set up a still and make slivovic, and you can only pawn so many plums off on friends and neighbors, I had on the order of 15 pounds of Italian prunes to dispense with.

With our change of diet to eliminate extra carbs, Patty and I have both been experimenting with reduced-carb desserts in the kitchen. And I've always been fond of central European (e.g., German) desserts, which tend to be sweetened much more lightly than American equivalents. Indeed, my earliest impression of "coffee cake" comes from the home of an elderly couple who were friends of the family, who served a delicious plum cake in their home. She was from Bavaria, so I guess she probably wouldn't have called it Zwetchgendatschi like the Austrians do (if they even really call it that; I have my suspicions that this is a made-up name designed to poke fun at the foreigners). Maybe she would have called it Pflaumenkuchen. The Internet calls it "Polish plum cake". Whatever you call it, it's tasty, and I aimed to recreate it at home. The plums are now nearly a month gone, but after multiple iterations the cake turned out well enough that I feel compelled to share it with the Internet.

Since we have friends who are dairy-intolerant, this particular recipe is tailored to be low-carb and dairy-free. It doesn't lose anything in the taste for being made with a restricted set of ingredients. The original recipe did call for a streusel, and a non-dairy streusel is pretty pointless so this recipe simply omits it.

Metric cooks, avert your eyes.

• 1¼ c almond flour
• 1¼ tsp baking powder
• ¼ tsp salt
• ¼ c Steviva blend
• 3 tbsp grapeseed oil
• ⅓ c milk
• 1 large egg
• 12 fresh plums, pitted and halved
• ⅛ tsp cloves

Lightly coat an 8"x8" pan with cooking spray. Heat oven to 350 degrees. In medium bowl, combine flour, baking powder, salt and Steviva. Add grapeseed oil, milk and egg. Beat at medium speed 4 minutes.

Pour batter into prepared pan. Place plums on top, cut side up, pushing down slightly into batter. Sprinkle cloves over the plums.

Bake about 50 minutes or until a toothpick tests clean.

Let the cake cool in the pan so the plum juices will be reabsorbed to create a moist cake. Sprinkle with confectioners' sugar, if desired, and cut into 16 squares.

[edit: the Internet is bad at me for my badly spelled german. Spelling corrected. ;)]