Ole Fashioned Southern Sugar Plum Cake
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Filled with spices, walnuts, and dried plums, this sugar plum cake recipe (also known as prune cake) is a delicious Southern version of fruit cake to bake this Christmas.
This sugar plum cake is one of my mother’s cherished recipes that her mother used to make her as a child, especially at Christmas time. I’ve heard her talk about it for years and it’s been decades since she had one so I decided to snatch the recipe and surprise her with it last week. Merry Christmas, Mama!
Sugar plum cake is an old-fashioned Southern recipe that basically resembles a traditional fruit cake. Besides the usual cake batter ingredients, your sugar plum cake is loaded with chopped nuts (walnuts or pecans), cinnamon and allspice, vanilla extract, and dried plums (also known as prunes, but people like seem to like dried plums more than prunes nowadays 😉).
It’s served with a deliciously sweet sauce, so you know each slice of this spiced prune cake is going to be scrumptiously dense, moist, and tender.
Recipe Ingredients
- All-purpose flour
- Chopped nuts (I used walnuts because they are cheaper than pecans)
- Eggs
- Cinnamon
- Sugar
- Baking soda
- Allspice
- Vanilla extract
- Buttermilk
- Oil
- Dried plums (pitted prunes)
Chop prunes or dried plums up so they’re the size of raisins.
If you get any with the pits in them, remove them and discard them (that’s fancy talk for “throwaway”).
I buy the packets of .
Place the sliced plums in a large bowl and add your flour.
Toss this flour mixture up a bit. This will help keep the from sinking all the way down into the cake when it is baking.
Add oil to the .
Then buttermilk.
Next, add eggs to the cake batter.
Then add the nuts (which you can leave out if your life is nutty enough).
Add vanilla extract.
Then the spices, baking soda, and salt.
Finally, add the sugar.
Mix that up with an electric or and then grease your cake pan.
I’m using a bundt cake pan, but Mama says her mother used to use a 9×13 cake pan, so go with whatever is easiest for you. If you’re going to use a 9×13 though, just spray it with a little cooking spray and you’ll be fine.
Us bundt users need to smear shortening in our pan.
Then sprinkle some flour into your bundt cake pan. Pat that around a bit to coat it and then discard the excess.
Here is our spice cake batter all mixed up.
Go ahead, you know you wanna lick the beater!
Pour that into your prepared pan…
and bake for about an hour, or until a toothpick inserted in the middle comes out clean.
Prepare the sauce
When that is getting ready to come out of the oven or shortly after, you need to assemble your sauce ingredients: vanilla, buttermilk, sugar, butter, and baking soda.
Add all of that together in a pot.
Bring it to a boil over , stirring constantly. It will foam up a little but that’s okay.
Keep stirring and cooking until it thickens a bit, about two minutes.
Poke holes all over the top of your hot prune cake.
Pour the hot sauce over the hot cake.
Let sit for about 10 minutes or so in the pan until it absorbs all of the sauce.
Then turn it out.
Serve warm or cold. It’s excellent with a dollop of homemade whipped cream or a scoop of
Now I see why Mama has missed this cake so much. It was WONDERFUL!
Storage
- Store cake leftovers in an airtight container at room temperature or in the fridge for up to 4 days.
- You can also store cooled cake leftovers in the freezer for up to 6 months. Thaw in the fridge before serving.
Recipe Notes
- Remember, you can use whichever nuts you like, including chopped pieces or slivered almonds for something different.
- Instead of the sauce, you can also serve your with . Check out this for pumpkin praline with for instructions.
Here are more old-fashioned Southern dessert recipes:
Old Fashioned Hummingbird Cake Recipe
Yellow Cake with Old-Fashioned Peanut Butter Icing
M&M Cookies Recipe by Mama (Old-Fashioned Recipe!)
Tea Cake Cookies (Old-Fashioned and Crispy)
Easy Old-Fashioned Peach Cobbler Recipe
Peanut Butter Pie Made the Old-Fashioned Way
Ingredients
- 2 cups all-purpose flour
- 1 ½ cups sugar
- 3 eggs
- 1 cup vegetable oil
- 1 tsp baking soda
- ½ tsp salt
- 1 tsp allspice
- 2 tsp cinnamon* or 1 tsp cinnamon and 1 tsp nutmeg
- 1 cup buttermilk
- 1 tsp vanilla extract
- 1 cup dried plums chopped
- 1 ½ cup chopped nuts I used walnuts
Sauce
- 1 stick butter
- 1 ½ cups sugar
- ½ tsp baking soda
- 2 tsp vanilla extract
- ½ cups buttermilk
Instructions
- Grease and flour a bundt or 9x13 cake pan. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
- Combine all cake ingredients in a large bowl. Beat with an electric mixer until well combined. Pour into the prepared pan and bake for one hour.2 cups all-purpose flour, 1 ½ cups sugar, 3 eggs, 1 cup vegetable oil, 1 tsp baking soda, ½ tsp salt, 1 tsp allspice, 2 tsp cinnamon*, 1 cup buttermilk, 1 tsp vanilla extract, 1 cup dried plums, 1 ½ cup chopped nuts
- Just before the cake is done, place all the sauce ingredients into a saucepan. Bring to a boil over medium heat, stirring constantly, and continue boiling gently until sauce is thickened, or about two minutes.1 stick butter, 1 ½ cups sugar, 2 tsp vanilla extract, ½ cups buttermilk, ½ tsp baking soda
- Remove the baked cake from the oven and poke holes all over the top with a fork. Pour the hot sauce over the hot cake. Allow the cake to sit in the pan until the sauce is absorbed.
Nutrition
The difference between an ordinary life and an extraordinary life
is finding extraordinary things in an ordinary life.
~Submitted by Judy. Submit your quote here.
You know, James and I have been togeather for 9 years, engaged for 8, and I still haven’t picked an engagement ring out. I’ve always used my great grandmother’s ring..it has more sentimental value, it’s free..and obviously, since we’re still not married, I’m not the traditional sort of gal, so while I think solitaire engagement rings are beautiful, they are so not for me. I don’t care if it’s made of plastic or platinum, it’s the meaning behind it that matters.
Off to make fudge!!
Smooches!
Hey Christy we have something in common! I am from Texas and my husband is from Arkansas. As soon as he graduated with his college degree he proposed to me and three months later we were married! I know what you are talking about when living in seperate states just won’t do. My ring story is different from yours though but if I knew what I did now it probably would have been a lot like it though. I created my ring on the internet and when we walked into a jewlry store there it was the exact one I had created it was a sign from God letting us both know that this was the right thing to do. So we have been married for nearly seven years and have three children! LOL!!!
I too had some problems with posting a comment last night as the “boxes ” were not present to fill out. I opened and closed the page several times between the email and the tutorial and it fixed itself like magic! The sugar plum cake looks wonderful. I wish I could have a slice warm from the oven with a cup of orange spice tea (my Fav) and sit and chat with all of you. You all feel like friends.
Hi Christy,
Those are nice rings, for what they mean, regardless of monetary value. Me and my husband got wedding bands. He gave me an engagement ring with a very small solitaire diamond, but as a symbol of our covenant we both wear the bands. They have no diamonds, no stones of any kinds. They are just gold wedding bands, but inside of mine there’s his name and the date we were married and inside of his there’s my name and the date we were married. Those were the rings the priest blessed in the church. Time has passed and they are not as smooth and shiny as they once were, bu I would not change them for any diamonds or jewels of any kind. 🙂
Gabi
Well, I like CZs for a different reason than you do. I just plain like big stones, I’m a large person and I feel small stones would look weird on me. Shortly after I was divorced, about 25 years ago I was staying at my sister’s house for a few days. I have to qualify here, this sister is 8 years younger than me, but an “old maid”, in every sense of the word, never married, never dated, has the typical “old maid” attitude. She was saying she sure would like to get a pair of 1 caret total weight diamond stud earrings, so that people would think she had scrimped and saved for them and I said well I don’t want anything less than 4 caret total weight, and I don’t care if people think a “sugar daddy” gave them to me. She was absolutely horrified, which I knew she would be. A few years later I got a pair of 4 caret CZs. When my oldest grandaughter graduated from high school this last spring I got her a pair of 3 caret CZ earrings. I have a girlfriend that kept bragging about the diamond stud earrings that she had finally bought for herself and the first time I saw her after she moved to the town I live in I didn’t notice any earrings, until she reached up and moved on from one of her holes to another. They weren’t much bigger than a piece of lint. I want people to be able to see my stones, anyway the few that I have. I have my earrings and a ring that is a real stone, which is a 2 caret emerald cut amytrine, I call that my big honker because it covers the area between two knuckles on my ring finger. I do have a three stone CZ band style ring, and a couple other pairs of earrings that have CZs in them. Well theres my story for this round.
Can’t wait to try this recipe out. Sounds yummy.
I think your rings are beautiful. They don’t need to be real diamonds. It it the love that makes a marriage not the rings.
I completely agree with you about the rings, Christy. My rings aren’t diamonds either – my engagement ring is my birthstone and my wedding band is cz and they cost less than yours did – but I would never EVER trade them for anything in the world, not even real diamonds, which my husband once made the mistake of suggesting.
And babies must love sparkly things, b/c my two fiddle with my rings all the time when I hold them in my lap!