Peared (upside) down

Baking inspiration comes in many forms. Sometimes I am home alone and bored and use baking as a somewhat productive form of entertainment; sometimes (read: often) I just really need brownies. One of my favorite baking inspirations, though, is the fridge. Fruit has a limited shelf life and, as much as I love chomping on whole fruit, sometimes it just doesn't all get eaten.

A friend recently gifted me a bag of plums. I checked on the fruit after they spent a weekend in a plastic bag in my sun baked kitchen only to find that they were literally cracking. After panicking and googling "cracked plums," I decided that the plums would do just fine in an upside down cake. This cake ended up a great success (I think. I only tasted a small bite before Justin ate the entire thing in two days) and had to be recreated.

My devoted fans might recall guest baker Cady. Despite her inability to tolerate gluten, she has a great appreciation of sugar-based chemical reactions. She's also just awesome. In preparation for her birthday/housewarming celebration, I got to work on a cake replication. I just so happened to have a bag of pears in the fridge that needed to be baked. Using the plum cake recipe as inspiration, I came up with this:

Upside Down Pear Cake
adapted from http://allrecipes.com/recipe/plum-blueberry-upside-down-cake/

- 1/4 cup brown sugar
- 1 stick butter
- 1 cup granulated sugar
- 1 egg
- 1 tsp vanilla
- 1 1/4 cup flour (if using gluten free flour, add about 1 tbsp guar or xanthan gum)
- 1 1/2 tsp baking powder (if going the gluten free route, be sure to check that the b.p. is gluten free. If it doesn't specify that it is gluten free, it probably isn't)
- 1/2 tsp salt
- 1/2 tsp cinnamon
- 3/4 cup milk
- two small to medium sized pears, cut into 1/2 inch slices

Preheat oven to 350˚ F. Grease a 9-inch pie dish (a cake pan works as well, but since an upside down cake must be dumped out of the pan, I found a pie dish's slanted slides to be very conducive).

Spread the brown sugar on the bottom of the dish. Cut 3 tbsp of the butter into pieces and arrange over the sugar in the pan. Place in oven for about 5 minutes. Remove pan, gently stir the melted butter with the sugar, and replace in oven for 5 minutes or until mixture is bubbling. Remove and set aside.

Mix together the flour, baking powder, cinnamon, salt and binding gum (if using). In a separate bowl, cream remaining butter (should be about 1/3 cup) with granulated sugar. Add the vanilla and mix thoroughly, then beat in egg. Alternate pouring in the flour mixture and the milk in 3 additions, ending with the milk. After each addition mix until just combined. Arrange the pear slices overlapping slightly in a circle on top of the brown sugar/butter mixture.

Pour the batter on top of the fruit. Bake for 35-40 minutes. Let the cake cool for at least 15 minutes before turning onto a plate (for the impatient folk out there, learn from my mistake. The first time I tried this cake I didn't let it cool for long enough and much of the topping stuck to the pan when I turned it over. Cake surgery was required). This would probably be really tasty with vanilla ice cream.