German Plum Kuchen- Pflaumenkuchen is a summer recipe that uses fresh plums in season. This German recipe is traditional from Transylvania and it is easy to make and delicious.
German Plum Kuchen- Pflaumenkuchen
I love this recipe. While plums are still in season, this recipe should be on the list of everyone who loves baking bars and using seasonal ingredients. The recipe comes from Transylvania and it is specific to the Saxon(German) cuisine.
Easy to make and incredible delicious, the German Plum Kuchen is a little treasure, great for a lazy Sunday afternoon snack, or dessert.
To make this recipe, I recommend the Italian plums for a more traditional taste. They are smaller and less juicy than American plums that I find, in my opinion, a little too big for this recipe.
When I was growing up, bars or cookies used to be baked in Transylvania only over the weekends and served during the week as snacks or special occasions.
The tray or the platter of desserts would sit quietly in the pantry waiting for a guest to come visit my grandma.
She would then make coffee and serve desserts with it. (Click here to learn how to make Turkish coffee, the way Romanians still like to drink their coffee).
I love to share old recipes that come from my family or from the places I grew up. I think that old recipes are teaching us about old times, they provide a window into everyday life long ago.
You can learn from them what people ate, what utensils they used in the kitchen, what ingredients they could buy in the stores, what cultural and culinary influences shaped them.
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Sometimes you can also learn about their social lives, because handwritten recipes frequently include the name of the person from whom the writer got the recipe.
Such recipe collections are important parts of family traditions, but also of broader cultural traditions. They tell us stories of a vanished world and connect us to our past and our roots.
Here are some more recipes from Transylvania:
Traditional Saxon Potato Tarragon Soup
This dessert is very simple. It has a shortbread crust on the bottom and fresh fruits on top. Bread crumbs are sprinkled over the plums to absorb the excess juice.
I am thinking that you can replace the plums with peaches, for example, I do not see why they would not work.
There is not a ton of sugar in these bars and I am not going to pretend that it is a fancy recipe. The ingredients are accessible and easy to put together and the result is delicious.
Tip: The dough can be made in a food processor! If you don’t have one, Amazon is a good place to start looking for a cheaper, reliable one! It is a life saver in the kitchen!
If you make the recipe, share it with the hashtag #thebossykitchen on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter so we can all see what you’re cooking!
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Interested in more dessert bars? Here you have the link for more recipes.
German Plum Kuchen- Pflaumenkuchen
German Plum Kuchen- Pflaumenkuchen is a summer recipe that uses fresh plums in season. This Transylvanian recipe is easy to make and delicious.
Ingredients
- 2 cups/8oz/250 g all purpose flour
- 1 pinch baking powder
- 1/2 cup/4.23oz/120g granulated sugar
- 1 stick/4.23oz/120g unsalted butter
- 1 large egg
- 2.2lb/1kg plums
- 1 tablespoon sweet graham crackers crumbs
- powder sugar to sprinkle on top of the bars
Instructions
- Sieve the flour together with the baking powder and sugar.
- Work the butter into the mixture until it looks like bread crumbs.
- Add the egg.
- Mix to make a dough. Cover in plastic wrap and let it rest for an hour.
- Tip: Use a food processor to mix the ingredients together.
- In the meantime wash and dry the plums, cut them in halves and remove the pits.
- Preheat the oven to 350F/180C.
- Use an 8x8 inch pan. Spread the dough on the bottom of the pan and place the plums on top of the dough in dense rows. Sprinkle them with the crumbs and bake at 180c for 40-45 mins. (the dough has to be baked, plums should still sweat)
- Let the pan cool, then cut the bars in squares and serve. Sprinkle powder sugar on top if you prefer.
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Nutrition Information:
Yield:
16Serving Size:
1Amount Per Serving:Calories: 145 Total Fat: 6.6g Saturated Fat: 4g Trans Fat: 0g Unsaturated Fat: 0g Cholesterol: 28mg Sodium: 48mg Carbohydrates: 20g Net Carbohydrates: 0g Fiber: 0.5g Sugar: 8g Sugar Alcohols: 0g Protein: 2.1g
Jana Fritzsche says
I am from Saxony, the town of Leipzig to be precise. Having grown up with exactly this cake, which my great-grandmother, grandmother, mum and now I have been making for generations. It is indeed absolutely delicious and still a stable in the bakeries, cafes and Sunday coffee table. I think it’s fab you posting this recipe but I really don’t understand what Transylvania (a German speaking part in Romania – totally different country) has to do with Saxon cake. It’s nothing to do with the area nor the cake. Saxons settled in Transylvania in the 11th century, a long long time before the cake emerged. I think it would have most people from Saxony gasp in bewilderment to hear someone claiming there was such a thing as Transylvanian Saxon plum cake as there has not been any actual cultural link between the two very different cultures and countries for centuries.
The Bossy Kitchen says
Hi Jana, Thank you for writing and visiting this recipe.
The Germans in Transylvania are indeed called Saxons(in English). In German they are called Siebenbürger Sachsen.Transylvania was under the Austro-Hungarian Empire for a long time, therefore there is a heavy influence of Austrian, German and Hungarian cuisines in Transylvania. It would be a mistake to believe that there is no actual link between the two cultures, as the Germans living in Transylvania where very careful to preserve their heritage. Many of them were educated in Germany, Austria or other countries occupied by the Austro-Hungarian Empire. These recipes traveled and were really well preserved.
The recipe comes from a book that my grandmother Herta used very often. It was a popular book in 1900s, made for young, freshly married women and it is called Siebenburgisches Kochbuch. The oldest version of this book that I was able to find is from 1959, but I am not sure when the first edition came out. The 1959 edition was printed in Bucharest.
This book is proof that the recipe was also used in Transylvania.I grew up with this recipe, like you did in Germany. As it is a recipe that my grandmother used to make, I think it is appropriate (based on my knowledge) to say that it is part of the Saxon cuisine of Transylvania.
As you can tell, the recipe is one of these gems that survived decades of good and bad history in Europe and also traveled with the Germans all over the world. Why do I say this? Because I have an American cooking book from 1955 called Saxon Cook Book and published by The Central Verband der Siebenbuerger Sachsen of the United States.
This little book has only recipes that arrived with the Transylvanian Saxons in early 1800’s and forward. There is a recipe of plum cake in this book that is very close to the version I grew up with.
The Preface of the book says among other things:”Transylvania, the homeland of Saxons, is surrounded by many nationalities. Inevitably, the influence of environment had its effect in kitchen. Our forebears combined, adapted and adopted as their own, a combination of Austrian, Hungarian, and German cookery.”
Jana says
thanks for your reply. This is very interesting and very close to what my father told me about the Siebenbürger. As said, it’s not that there is no actual link but that the cultural links lay very very far back in history and have very very few relevance to any ‘common’ cultural links since the early 1900s. As said, it’s fair to call it a Saxon plumcake, if you exclude the graham crackers (which cannot in any way replace the original and traditional “Streusel”, made from butter, flour and sugar and which have a far more delicious taste than a cracker mix. They are a Saxon tradition on not only plumcake, but also apple and traditional Saxon Butterstreuselkuchen. I am sure the Siebenbürger have made a great job combining recipes ranging from the Austrian-Hungarian Empire and Germany they have collected along the way.However, no-one in Germany would associate a Pflaumenstreusel with anything other than Saxony. A bit like New York cheese-cake, a Brand-name so to speak or 5th generations Americans citing their Irish routes, whilst Irish people would insist they are Americans. Germans associate certain cakes with Saxony, same as we do with the sausages in the various regions. They are sacred. It’s like the Budweiser comes from the Chech town of Budvar and is not a US Beer, though they claimed the name, or a real maple Syrup will never be anything other than Canadian, if they are anything to go by. We Saxons too, like to hold on to our traditions, it includes the culinary ones and two of our sacred foods are plum-cake and the Stollen, no matter who ran off with the recipe. It’s only ever a real Stollen if it comes from Dresden, the capital of Saxony. Anything else, is not a ‘Dresdener Christstollen’, it wouldn’t be a ‘Dresdener Christstollen if it was made in Siebenbürgen, as the name and recipe is actually protected by law.
The Bossy Kitchen says
First of all, my recipe is not a Pflaumenstreusel. It is a Pflaumenkuchen. The original recipe requires bread crumbs on top of the plums, not streusel.I chose to use graham crackers, which are sweeter and more appropriate for the American readers. The most popular US bread crumbs available in the grocery stores have herbs and other ingredients that are not suitable for baking sweet desserts. Also, my recipe is not called Saxon plumcake, it is called German Plum Kuchen, and I only specified that it is traditional to the Saxon cuisine of Transylvania. There is no claim in my article that this recipe comes from Saxony, Germany, or that it is a traditional dessert in your country. I think the name is appropriate as it is indeed a German dessert, specific to the Saxons living in Transylvania and nothing else.
With all due respect, I am not sure why we are debating something that it is very clear to me: Saxony is part of Germany, there is a cake named Pflaumenstreusel that is specific to the region. While it might be quite similar to the recipe you know, my recipe comes from Transylvania and it was made by my Saxon grandmother. Saxons of Transylvania are not the same as the Saxons of Germany, as we already clarified, even if they are still Germans. Also, the recipe is not made with streusel, but with bread crumbs or graham crackers. It is possible that the recipe was adopted and adapted to the ingredients available in Transylvania and the streusel was replaced with simple bread crumbs, which makes this cake different than yours.
I think the “Saxon” word is what bothers you the most, but I think we clarified the semantics already. 🙂
Glenna says
Wow. The comments. Anyway, I was wondering why the total time to make this cake says 1 hour when there is a required resting time of 1 hour in addition to the total time.
The Bossy Kitchen says
Hi Glenna, Thank you for letting me know. I made the correction on the time, it was a technical glitch in the recipe card. And yes, the comments, I know…:-)
Jennifer says
I’m excited to try this! Part of my heritage is Germans from Russia and they have amazing Kuchen also! It is a bit different as it has a custard filling on top of the base and then the fruit on top. I’m excited to try your recipe as I have an egg allergy and can replace 1 egg but the 4 eggs in my family recipe is too much to replace. I love your knowledge of the history of your family