I have this taste memory of some kind of prune bar that my Grandma Mollie made. We didn’t like much of her cooking, it was too different from what our mom fed us, but I loved her cheese blintzes and these bars. They were square bars that she stored in a tin, and in my memory, anyhow, they were a pretty basic prune crumble bar – I think they had a little hint of lemon, but no spices to speak of. And I think the exotic flavor, to my 8- or 9-year old palate, was butter – my mom cooked mostly with margarine, Fleischmann’s original salted – her method of low salt cooking, to please my high blood pressure specialist doctor dad, was to cook with salted fat, and not add any extra salt.
The texture that I remember is not what you get from a typical crumble bar cookie, where you make the streusel part, pat half into the pan, spread on the filling, and then top with crumbs – Mollie’s prune bar was cakier. I am pretty sure that the right type of thing is a crumb cake, or kuchen, where you make the crumbs, reserve some for topping, then add eggs and milk to the rest to make a batter. I think the batter needs to be on the thick side, and then spread in a thin layer. I have a Maida Heatter apple kuchen where the batter part is about right, but the topping is completely different, so years ago I printed out a very plain crumb cake that I found online someplace, and noted – “try for Mollie prune bars” on the top.
Today I finally got around to trying it – and I knew in my heart when I read the recipe, that it was going to be too cakey, produce too much batter, and I really should reduce the milk, and probably use one less egg – but I didn’t. And, since I was making the cake for a mixed group, I made pineapple filling instead of prune – and I knew when I read the recipe for that, that I shouldn’t put in as much water as it said – but I did.
So I ended up with a fluffy and soft pineapple coffee cake – the crumbs just sank, there was so much liquid – so I made a little cream cheese drizzle glaze to improve the looks of the top. It’s a nice cake, but it’s not the prune bars. But I think it’s a step towards the prune bars, anyways. I’ll be sure to let you know when I get there.
