Peach Upside Down Cake—Tuesdays With Dorie—Baking With Julia

Peach Upside Down Cake

For Tuesdays With Dorie--Baking With Julia this go-round, we were to make the Nectarine Upside Down Chiffon Cake.  Check out our hosts’ posts for the recipe. 

Susan at The Little French Bakery and Marlise at The Double Trouble Kitchen are the blogs to visit for the recipe. 

I sort of veered off the written recipe.  I couldn’t help it.  When I looked at the cake, I decided I just couldn’t make a cake that had six eggs.  I need to cut back on so many decadent, fattening treats a bit.  But I did stick with a couple things as they were in the recipe from the book. 

*The original cake is supposed to have nectarines, but I used peaches.  I did a quick water-boiling bath to remove the skins and sliced them into eight slices each.  I used three peaches. 

*When I saw that the butter/brown sugar layer for the peaches to rest on had one cup of brown sugar, I decided it didn’t need that much sugar, so I cut it from one cup to only half a cup.  I think it was just fine.  I should have cut the butter, too.  It would have been just fine with less butter as well.

*I did make the streusel just how the recipe was written, except I used whole wheat pastry flour instead of all purpose flour.  The streusel was one of my favorite things about the cake. 

*And finally, I didn’t make the chiffon cake.  Instead I made this French Yogurt Cake, with just the vanilla extract.  And I again used whole wheat pastry flour.   Making this “lighter” cake, which has oil instead of butter and of course, yogurt (I used fat free, plain Greek yogurt), I felt better about having some of the dessert when it was done.  I also baked the cake in a 9-inch springform pan, though the recipe says to use a 10-inch pan.  I don’t have one.  I think it was just fine in the 9-inch, but I’m sure the French Yogurt Cake didn’t have as much batter as the chiffon cake would have made.  

  I have a little laugh for you.  I prepared the cake, put it in the oven, set the timer for 30 minutes and went about my business.  The timer beeped.  I opened the oven, saw that it looked like it still needed more time, so I set the timer again for 10 more minutes.  When the timer beeped again, I opened the oven and noticed the cake didn’t look any different.  Hmmm?   What could be the problem?  Why, yes, yes I did “bake” the cake with the oven off!  SIGH  It never occurred to me until after that 40 minutes that the oven wasn’t even on!  What a goofball!  I know, I’m not the only one to do such a thing, but silly me! 

I removed the cake from the oven while it preheated.  I think one of the reasons I didn’t realize the oven was off was because it was still warm from baking the streusel.  I like to think I would have noticed a cold oven.

My family prefers Cool Whip to fresh whipped cream.  I only obliged this time because we happened to have a tub of it in the refrigerator.  Sometimes, it is just so much easier to dollop a little Cool Whip on things—you know, there’s nothing quite like a little hydrogenated oil and high fructose corn syrup to top off a great, healthier cake.  sigh