After the not-so-success of the last recipe (Orangesicle Bars), I was looking for a win today.

Today’s recipe is another dessert – a cake – with a pleasant fruity component. As you can see from the name, this was a plum upside-down cake. I have never made an upside-down cake before, they always seemed intimidating to me.

If you don’t know, or have just never tried making one, upside-down cakes involve a caramel which goes into the pan first, followed by fruit and then the cake batter on top. Once it is baked, you flip it out of the pan (very carefully) to reveal this beautiful fruit and caramel topped cake. A pretty common fruit to use in this type of cake is pineapple but today’s cake is using plums which I love!

Starting with the caramel, which was simply a mix of brown sugar and some non-dairy butter. It melts together until the sugar is dissolved and becomes a thick caramel sauce. That goes into a prepared pan, quickly followed by the sliced plums. Make sure to arrange them nicely because that is what you will see when you flip the cake over.

Now for the batter. This was a very basic cake mix with all the typical ingredients: flour, sugar, oil, salt, baking powder & soda, almond milk and vanilla. There was one other ingredient that took this cake up a notch though – almond extract. This can be very overpowering if you use too much, but when done right, it adds such a nice floral and extra delicious taste.

Everything was going great but partway through the baking, I went to check on the cake and I noticed something was wrong. I used a springform pan because I figured it would help with the removal but somehow, the caramel sauce was oozing out the bottom and made a mess in my oven. The clasp on the pan is always very good so not sure what happened here but all I could do was put the pan on a baking sheet and continue along with the baking.

Upon flipping it out though, I could see that there was very little caramel remaining which made me a little sad. The cake however, was delicious! I love the almond flavour and it went great with the fresh plums. It was so moist and very fluffy. For how simple the batter was, I’m quite impressed with how it turned out and I would definitely make it again. I am still upset about the caramel but I’ll just have to try again with the different pan and hope it turns out perfect!

This was a pretty good ending to the week though and I’m looking forward to the last few recipes of the book (yes, I’m almost finished the Brave New Meal cookbook).