Persimmon Bundt Cakes with maple bourbon glaze, pages 166-167




Oliver (Thing 1) and his cousin Molly on Halloween

  Well, the persimmons we picked a few weeks ago that were mostly not ripe--they were harder to get ripe than I thought. We froze and thawed them twice on the theory that frosts are what cause persimmons to ripen. That actually didn't work. The tannic aspect of the unripe persimmons was still going strong. We ended up setting them outside for about a week which worked pretty well.  Only the persimmons got a bit dry with all the abuse we were giving them. I ran them through the Foley food mill anyway and got about seven cups of pulp out of the deal. Counting it up, I think we need 11 cups of pulp for all the recipes in the book. My mom sent up up a couple cups of pulp she still had in the freezer from last year, so we are getting close. Persimmons are long gone off the trees by now, though.

My first persimmon recipe I made was for a party to celebrate my neice and son's recent accomplishments in school. They are in the same class and found out this week that they qualified for a special program at school they were really wanting to get into go. So, my cousin made a great seafood dinner and I brought a persimmon bundt cake for dessert. The cake is heavily spiced with cinnamon, ginger, cloves, allspice and has golden raisins and black walnuts in it. The glaze is made with maple syrup and bourbon. So there are two or potentially three wild ingredients in the cake: persimmons, black walnuts we picked from Fred's farm, and  maple syrup (if you could tap maple trees. Ours was store bought). Also, the eggs were from out backyard chickens.

We finished up the cake this morning for breakfast dessert. Cake and coffee-ooo, la la. I think Henry, our 10 year old, was the most infatuated about the cake. He thought it might be the best cake he'd ever had. We all thought it was very tasty, however, and I would definitely make it again.