Cherry Upside Down Cake

Tonight I'm hosting a meeting at my house. Someone else is bringing dinner and I decided to make a dessert. Lately, most of my baking has been kid-friendly cookies, quick muffins, or cakes that come together in one bowl. But after seeing the gorgeous photos on Food Librarian's blog a few weeks ago, I decided to flex my baking muscle a little bit and go for something more challenging. I'm not always up for the extra steps of separating eggs or arranging fruit in a decorative manner but baby girl was sleeping and I had a good time making this.

Since you can look at the Food Librarian's post for much more beautiful pictures than I can ever take, I'll instead share with you my inner baking monologue.


While the cake was in the oven: Did I beat those egg whites enough? They seemed stiff and if I beat them longer and they got to be dry, there would be no going back, right? Well, I could have started over with new egg whites but that is really wasteful. Speaking of waste . . . is anyone going to like this? Maybe this group is more the chocolate cake crowd and I shouldn't have bothered with something like this. Shoot . . . here's a bunch of the flour mixture that I spilled on the counter without realizing. How much difference does a couple of teaspoons make in baking? Probably a lot. What am I going to make if this is a disaster and I don't want to serve it? I must have a cake mix around here somewhere. Boy, there are a lot of dirty bowls from this recipe. Better get the dishes done before naptime is over


When the cake came out of the oven: I'm a genius! This is beautiful and everybody is going to love it. Okay, maybe not, but even if they hate it, my husband will cover it in Ben and Jerry's and love it. There's no way I'm making anything else today. I'm glad someone is bringing dinner.

If you want to try it, here's the Recipe on Epicurious. The only changes I made were using 1/2 tsp. almond extract and 1/2 tsp. vanilla extract instead of all vanilla and I used a 3 inch deep springform pan instead of a cake pan.