For someone that isn’t the biggest fan of fruit desserts, I sure have a few fruity recipes in my portfolio. I’ve had so many terrible iterations of fruit desserts growing up, they scarred me for life. Not sure how relatable this is, but you know when someone brings dessert to your home, or you have cake at a family gathering, it looks great, you take a bite expecting a nice and tender texture, then your teeth hit a soggy raisin or dried plum. Something about that didn’t sit right with me as a child, and I’m still working on getting over it.
There’s a fine line between a decent fruit cake and something that’ll make me gag, and the more I live, the more I realize it’s all about the texture of the cooked fruit. Whenever I throw a fruit in a sweet dish, I need it to either turn into undetectable mush, like a mashed banana in a banana bread, either in a jammy, melt-in-your-mouth deliciousness, similar to fruits in a tarte Tatin, nothing in between. I don’t want a partially cooked apple cube, that’s kind of raw in the middle, or a thick slice of baked banana in a cake, see what I’m saying? It also depends on the fruit, but I won’t get into that today.
Well, today’s cake meets all my requirements for a fruit cake: it’s an upside down plum fennel cake. It has a gorgeous ruby red color, a subtle minty fennel flavor, the plum layer melts in your mouth and the cake itself its amazingly moist and tender. And guess what? The cake batter comes together in one bowl, FUN! Every cake I’ve tested for this recipe was gone in less than two days. It’s a tiny snack cake that works well as a sweet breakfast, a quick snack throughout the day, or a dinner dessert.
If you want to double the batter and make a larger cake that’ll last for longer, be my guest! You might have to adjust the baking time, but other than that, you should be good.
RECIPE
Servings: 6 to 8
Prep Time: 20 minutes
Cook Time: 40 minutes
INGREDIENTS
Caramel
2/3 cup or 135 grams sugar
2 teaspoons fennel seeds
Cake
400 g or 4 large firm plums, thinly sliced using a mandolin or a sharp knife (2 to 3 mm or 1/16 to 1/8 inch thick, almost see-through)
1 egg
1 stick or 113 grams butter, melted
1/4 cup or 54 g olive oil
1/3 cup or 70 g milk
2 teaspoons lemon zest
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/4 teaspoon kosher salt
1/2 cup or 100 g sugar
1 tablespoon fennel seeds, freshly ground
1/2 heaping cup or 54 g almond flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1 cup + 1 tablespoon or 140 g all purpose flour
2 tablespoons candied fennel seeds for topping, optional
SUBSTITUTIONS FOR:
olive oil: avocado oil, grape seed oil, sunflower seed oil, any other neutral oil of choice
milk: non-dairy milk
lemon juice: apple cider vinegar
almond flour: preferably another gluten-free flour, or all purpose flour
egg: flax seed egg or any vegan binder substitute
butter: vegan butter
INSTRUCTIONS
Lightly grease an 8 inch or 20 cm round pan (or loaf pan) with oil and line the bottom with parchment paper. You can use a larger pan, but keep in mind you will need to make more batter than the recipe calls for, otherwise your cake will turn out thin like a pancake.
For the caramel, add the sugar to a pot or pan on medium low heat and wait for it to melt, for 5 to 7 minutes, without mixing the sugar. As easy as it sounds, caramelizing sugar can be frustrating sometimes (but it doesn’t have to :) ).
There are two ways to cook caramel: a dry one and a wet one. The dry one involves cooking the sugar on its own until it caramelizes, and the wet one uses water in the process, which makes the sugar more prone to crystallization and it’s my least preferred method.
For the dry method: start with a dry saucepan, I usually use a stainless steel pan, add the sugar, and wait for it to melt, untouched. Don’t leave the pot unattended, things can go south in a few seconds.
For the first few minutes, you’re simply waiting for the sugar to melt. You will notice the sugar starting to liquify around the edges, and slowly liquifying its way to the middle of the pan. You can gently tilt and shake the pan to prevent the sugar from burning in one spot and help move it around the pan. Mixing the sugar with a spoon or spatula will help form clumps of sugar or encourage crystallization, which we certainly want to prevent.
You have to know when to stop: we are aiming for a deep amber color, not too light and pale, not too dark and burnt. Remove the pan off heat as soon as you see that caramel amber color. Keep in mind, it’s better to stop sooner than later. The sugar will continue to caramelize off heat, due to the residual heat in the pan. You can always place it back on heat for a few more minutes if necessary, but you can’t bring burnt sugar back to its non-burnt state. One more thing, melted sugar is extremely hot, so be careful when handling it.
Once caramelized, mix fennel seeds in the melted sugar. Immediately pour the hot sugar in the baking pan lined with parchment paper. The sugar will harden pretty quickly, so you want to move fast.
Heat the oven at 350°F or 175°C.
Arrange the thinly sliced plums on the bottom of the pan, over the caramelized, probably hardened, sugar. A trick to prevent the cake batter from flooding through the fruit slices is to layer them over each other in columns. Don’t start from the middle, don’t aim for a circular pattern, simply start from one side of the pan, create a line of layered plums, then another one layered over the previous one. Repeat this step until you can’t see the bottom of the pan. You will have a few leftover plum slices, evenly layer those on top of the base plum layer.
For the cake batter, add the egg, butter, oil, milk, citrus zest, citrus juice, vanilla extract, salt, sugar, ground fennel, almond flour in a bowl and whisk until combined.
Sift the flour and baking powder over the batter and roughly mix with a spatula until there are no more dry flour spots. Pour the cake batter over the plums.
Place the cake pan on a baking sheet, place that on the middle rack of your oven and bake for 40 to 50 minutes, or until the cake looks golden brown on top and seems hard to the touch.
Allow the cake to rest for 3 to 5 minutes, then carefully flip the cake pan on a serving dish, carefully lift up and reveal the wonderful plum design. Serve right away with candied fennel seeds on top.
The cake can be stored at room temperature, in a box or glass container, up to 4 days.
How to layer the plum slices:
Upside Down Plum Fennel Cake