I was going to have made The Summer Fruit and Almond Cake for my aunt’s 100th birthday tomorrow but the overnight wind and rain reduced our raspberries and blackberries to mush.

But there are plums! Queen Victoria’s! I substituted 350g of prepared plums for the fruit in the Summer Cake recipe and the result is a different cake but equally good. 100 in three candles will be the decoration!

My cousins and I remember the orchard at Broomfield, our grandparents’s house in Maidenhead. Aunty Pat is very knowledgeable about fruit trees. Yellow Egg, Pershore and Early Rivers are the varieties we remember being grown there.

-Susan