Pioneer Prune Cake

Part three of the three part Pioneer Woman's recipes series...which she enticed readers with the headline "make this cake today, trust me".

Ok, I can do that! At least after seeing the pictures of the final product - YUMMMMM!

I have to admit, I was a little skeptical when the recipe started of with doing this:


That's one cup of prunes boiled for 8 minutes. But y'know what? I've had some REALLY good desserts with dates - they have a natural sweetness that is soooo good in this sort of thing, so I went with it!

Once boiled, the prunes get mashed. Here you also see the eggs, oil, sugar and buttermilk for the recipe.


All of the wet ingredients and then prunes get added to the dry ingredients (looks like oatmeal at this point).


Poor it into a fancy dish - something to distract people from asking something like "hey, what's the main ingredient in this cake?!"


And just as it's about done baking, cook up the icing/frosting/glaze, which also include some buttermilk. Oh, and here's a hint - make it in a bigger pot that you expect you'd need to make it in! Pioneer Woman says a "medium" pot - I'd say go a bit bigger! What you see here is the icing cooking up in the SECOND pot I poured it into, after it about overflowed the first, smaller pot. And it's about to reach the top of this one!


NOT the most flattering picture here - this is the prune cake (oops! I said it!) after the icing has been poured on. And, sorry, I don't have any pictures of it sliced, so you'll just have to go back to Ree's site for that...


What I have to say about this cake is....it tasted DAMN GOOOOOOD!!!! People LOVED it at work!! It might've helped that, at first, I was advertising it as "buttermilk plum" cake. Heh heh.... I got one or two "uh oh - what did I just eat?!" looks after I told people it was a prune cake, but everyone loved it. DEFINITELY a keeper recipe - and you should try it too!