Persimmons Coffee Cake

How to use those many spoon-soft persimmons that still hung so late in the year? I’d eaten so many fresh off the tree it’s a wonder I didn’t turn orange. Yet even after picking pound after pound, the trees seemed as full of fruit as before I’d begun. Enter, coffee cake.

This was a whoo-hoo-hooray banner year for persimmons in our region, the piedmont of the Blue Ridge Mountains. I have no idea why, but we weren’t alone in finding far more persimmons ripening on the tree than in any year previous. The variety I’d planted some years ago are fuyu, the kind of persimmon that is delicious even before they get soft. So, we started eating them early. I’d peel and slice them to crunch fresh or julienne into slaw. Beginning when the fruit was barely blushing toward the orange-y orange they would become, I picked carefully in a kind of thinning of them. The braches are slender, and I wanted to relieve some of the weight the fruits were already putting on the wood. There were so many that at some point, we began to weigh our pickings.

By fall, when the fruits in their full glory – bright orange, and barely softening – it was clear that there was no way we’d keep up eating them only fresh. I dusted off the dehydrator and went to work. Still, the persimmons ripened faster than I could manage.

And then, in a surprise-not-surprise my dear dad, nearly 94 years old, died. It was the end of October, golden-crisp days in Duluth. Just the day before, he had walked two miles with a couple of good friends – an ordinary day. Dad was tired (not unusual) the following morning, slept in, and woke for a bite to eat with my brother-in-law there in the apartment. He laid his head down again. Fifteen minutes later, he died.

How could I not in my grief nevertheless be more grateful than anything?! I’d spent so much time with my dad over the past years, living with him for weeks at a time, amounting to somewhere between three and four months each year. With my sister Linnea living with him the other weeks and her husband Jon a bit of that time, we had done what we had hoped hoped hoped: kept him home with us until the end. As soon as I got the news, I headed back to Duluth, carrying as many persimmons as TSA would allow. I stayed on, preparing for our dad’s burial (he’d helped Jon build his pine casket), a funeral service, and helping to clear the apartment so Linnea and Jon could make it theirs. We ate all the persimmons. Mr. Hollywood mailed me more.

Still, when I got home mid-December, the trees seemed to have the same number of fruits as they’d set in spring. I got some more into the dehydrator in slices and then in layers of pulp I rolled up to a chewy sweet leather. Finally, I was eating persimmons squishy-soft over the sink with a spoon. Glorious. But still. When it snowed, the fruit hung like ornaments. With about 200 pounds of fruit in our tally, I hated to think they rest would go to waste. Enter, the ever-adaptable coffee caked. Based on Marian Burros’s famous New York Times plum torte, I baked up sweet rounds to share. Here’s my persimmon riff on that recipe with a few other adaptations, to boot. As you can see, it’s also delicious with persimmons not quite so ripe, that still have a bite to the flesh.

Persimmons Coffee Cake

(Makes a nice 8-9″ round to serve six to eight people.

Ingredients:

• about 1 C. pulp of very ripe persimmons (or 1/4″ thick slices from firm persimmons enough to cover the top)
• 1/2 C. butter, room temperature, plus enough to grease the pan
• 3/4 C. sugar
• 3/4 C. all-purpose flour, plus enough to dust the pan
• 1/4 C. cornmeal
• 1 t. baking powder
• 1 t. salt
• 1 t. ground cardamom (1/2 t. if you’re grinding it fresh)
• 2 eggs
• lemon juice, cinnamon and sugar, for topping

Cream the butter and sugar. Add the flour, cornmeal, baking powder, salt, and cardamom. Stir. Add the eggs and beat well.

This is when I begin preheating the oven (350 degrees). Our small wall oven heats pretty quickly, and the remaining steps take a little while. No sense wasting the energy.

Grease the baking pan and lightly dust with flour or cornmeal. Spoon the batter into the pan and smooth the top. Lay the persimmon pulp all over the top as evenly as possible. Sprinkle with lemon juice and a dusting of cinnamon and sugar. Slip into the hot oven and bake for about 45 minutes.

Cool a bit and turn out onto a cooling rack. When you can’t wait any longer, eat it with a good cup of coffee and, ideally, a few friends.

This lasts in the fridge for a long time (weeks, believe it or not – I discovered by accident), in the freezer even longer. I store it simply in a nice round tin. No plastic necessary.