Plum and orange upside-down cake
Not being able to cook for someone is like telling me, as a Brit, that I’m no longer to say sorry, thank you, or please.
Cooking deserves its own language of love. An act of service, yes, but it’s also time spent together, the giving of a gift, the receiving of one, and, in its own way, physical touch.
What to do, then, when your WWOOFING adventures in Portugal are coming to an end and you really need to say thank you in my own language?
Stealth bake of course.
The odds in our favour:
A separate kitchen from our hosts
Ample fruit from the garden
Beer for the baker
And the odds not in our favour:
No recipe
No time
Not our kitchen
Not much sleep
One cake tin, bigger than anything I’d used before
I sneak into the outside kitchen, spotting that we’ve been left some food for the evening. Our ever hospitable hosts would not be back.
That afternoon we’d popped to the one shop in Fernando Po. Each item is hand priced, bic biro embossed onto glossy packaging. Sugar, flour, oil. Then to the chickens on the farm in the hope that one of our afternoon layers had squeezed out another egg.
A gentle encouragement to shuffle off of her hay showed our little hen friend had indeed left us the goods.
So much produce. There were almost too many options. Lemons, satsumas, pears, plums, thyme, basil, olive oil, almonds.
Alex and Hweech after a morning’s work beneath the orange trees
A Nigel Slater thyme and lemon cake perhaps?
Maybe an old favourite of mine - lime, olive oil, basil?
A classic Dorset apple, but with pears instead?
None felt quite right, especially not in such a wide tin, one I wasn’t used to baking in.
Beers arrive with Hweech (our fellow WWOOFER) and my partner, who perch in the kitchen. We chat Bake-off bakes, having huddled around a phone, shoulder to shoulder to shoulder on the sofa the previous night to catch the latest episode live.
I giggle, remembering the joy of introducing pineapple upside down cake to a friend back home. They hadn’t been able to remember the name. It became the inside out pineapple cake.
That’s it! Invert the cake, allow the fruit to ooze in its own syrupy goodness, less cake batter needed to create depth, and a bake that will survive until the next day.
My heart eased. Like remembering the exact words in a language you almost know.
This little cake made a tiny dent into the orange, plum, and almond mounds at the farm. A late-night bake (photographed the next morning) as a thank you to our hosts whose hospitality knew no bounds.
Thanks Humus Farm. We’ll be back (and not just because you’ve got our bikes!).
Recipe
200g self-raising flour
Pinch of salt
200ml vegetable oil + extra for greasing
75g ground almonds
175g golden caster sugar + 2tbsp extra
3 large eggs
5 plums stoned and sliced
1 orange, zested and juiced
1tbsp marmalade (the most bitter you can find!)
Method
Preheat the oven to 170°C (150°C fan). Grease and line the base of a cake tin. Here I used a 9 inch springform cake tin.
Sprinkle the 2tbsp sugar onto the base of the tin. Lay the plum slices on top.
Sift together the flour, sugar, and salt. Stir in the ground almonds.
Make a well in the centre of the dry ingredients. Crack in the three eggs, pour in the oil, add in the zest of your orange and half of the juice. Mix gently with a wooden spoon until combined.
Pour the mixture on top of the plums.
Pop into the oven and bake for 45-50 minutes. It’s baked when coming away from the edges and a knife comes out clean.
Leave to cool in the tin for ten minutes. Warm the marmalade gently in a pan as the cake cools. Then release the beast, flip it upside down, and brush on the marmalade glaze.
Eat warm, or it keeps well for a few days.