southernfusionfood

Peach-Pecan Upside Down Cake

This recipe is my wife Melanie Jane’s specialty, and she has been making it since she was a teenager. It originally was for pineapple, but we had fresh peaches, not fresh pineapples; for some reason, there were no fresh pineapples at the farmer’s market.

Ingredients

For the Cake:

3 Eggs, separated

1 cup Sugar

1 cup Flour

1 tablespoon Baking Powder

1 tablespoon Salt

For the Topping:

1/4 cup Butter

1 cup Brown Sugar

1/2 cup Pecans, chopped

2-3 fresh Peaches, sliced

This recipe is upside down, so it is made backwards, topping first, and cake second. Begin by melting the butter in a pan, dissolving the sugar in the hot butter, and adding the pecans. Pour that into a heavy skillet, and arrange the sliced peaches on top of this mixture. We use a really heavy Lodge Pro-Logic cast iron skillet.

Combine the dry ingredients, mix, and then beat the sugar and egg yolks together. Combine those two. Make a meringue with the whites, and fold that into the flour/egg yolk mixture. Pour the whole thing into the skillet with the topping, and cook at 350 degrees F for thirty minutes. It’s imperative that this cake be inverted onto a platter as soon as it comes out of the over–otherwise the now caramelized top will stick like crazy.

In our experience, these things don’t stick around long. We made certain of that by serving ours with some homemade peach ice cream. The result was some serious peach on peach action.

Peaches

Fresh peach season is here. Get them and cook them while you can.

Fig Preserves

Fig preserves are a staple of Southern breakfasts, and good figs are not easy to come by anymore. I get them whenever I can, and sure enough, a farmer at the Festhalle Farmer’s Market had some this weekend. It was time to make some preserves.

Ingredients

4 cups Figs, halved

1 cup Water

Organic Sugar to taste

1 tablespoon Lemon Juice

That’s it. Just be prepared to simmer these things for at least a couple of hours. The amount of sugar needed depends on how ripe the figs are. These were dead ripe, so I didn’t need that much sugar.

After about an hour and a half of cooking, I resorted to my wife’s medieval looking antique potato masher, to speed things up. It’s a mashing machine.

Three Eight Ounce Jars of Preserves, Brought to You by this Masher

After about two hours of total cooking, I added a package of Certo liquid pectin–not required, but it does speed things up. The three filled jars then went into a hot water bath for ten minutes, and sealed almost as soon as I took them out. Into the pantry now, and onto some English Muffins or Drop Biscuits, eventually.