German Plum Cake and Five Flying Geese

There goes dinner. Years ago, shortly after we moved to a rural area in southern Ontario, my hubby and I decided to raise five geese for our Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners. We were city folk playing at farming, although we had all of 1.5 acres, and we had no idea what we were doing. One of our neighbors told us we ought to clip the feathers on one wing. That would make the geese too lopsided to fly away. It sounded sensible, so we clipped them and felt rather pleased with ourselves. Every morning, we walked the geese from their enclosure down to the pond. Every evening, we walked them back again. Here's a photo of our five-year-old Andrew and three-year-old Mike helping walk the geese. The little fellow with them is a friend. Then one morning, when we were halfway up the property, we heard a great rush of wings overhead. There went all five geese, flying right over us. My hubby looked at me and said, “There goes dinner.” Thankfully, they didn’t go far, and we managed to herd them back home. That was the day we learned that feathers grow back. Out came the clippers again, and we had our goose for Thanksgiving and Christmas after all. This happened around this time of year, about forty years ago, right at the peak of plum season. Somehow, those two memories have always stayed together for me. When the prune plums begin appearing at the market, I still think of those five geese flying over our heads and my hubby saying, “There goes dinner.” These days, I’m much happier bringing home a basket of plums and turning them into cake. Right now, plums are everywhere, and one of my favorite ways to use them is in a cake topped with a good layer of streusel. My recipe skips the yeast dough altogether. It uses a quick quark-öl dough, and when I can’t find quark, I simply use Greek yogurt instead. No one’s the wiser. Prune plums can be quite tart, so I sprinkle a little sugar over them before adding the streusel. Sometimes I add a pinch of cinnamon too. The cake bakes up buttery and just sweet enough, especially with a spoonful of whipped cream. It also keeps beautifully past the first day, if there’s any left over. That was the last time we kept geese. After that, we kept apple and plum trees. Trees suited us much better than geese. Tschüss!Oma Gerhild P.S. Today's recipe: Plum Cake

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German Plum Cake and Five Flying Geese

There goes dinner.

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