Plum & Oat Madeira Cake

A while ago I bought a bag of oatmeal from the local health food shop to make oatcakes. I've recently being having a freezer and cupboard purge with the vow of using up things before they get forgotten forever in a dark corner. I could see that the oatmeal could become one of those cupboard lurkers so I had a little look on the Internet to see what oatmeal containing cakes it threw up. It turned out to be a bit of a trawl through several pages of various porridge recipes before I came across this cake recipe. I'm a big porridge fan (I've just come back from my parents with a nice supply of stewed windfall apples to go with said breakfast) but I prefer the jumbo oats in it rather than oatmeal. It was the Waitrose website that
featured this take on a Madeira cake. It smelt delicious while it was baking and I was pleased that the very under ripe plums I used tasted great once cooked. The jury however is out on this cake as a whole. In all fairness the original recipe calls for medium oatmeal and mine was coarse so this probably has made a difference - you can really taste little oaty bursts while eating it which are pleasant but slightly odd. It is not disimilar to a polenta cake but not quite as moist and refined. It was just fine with a cup of afternoon tea but Mr CB won't be taking it to my usual testers at his office as he said he didn't think they'd like it very much. Well I did marry him for his honesty!