These upside-down cake recipes prove the old adage that necessity is the mother of invention.
Jack White, lead singer and guitarist of The White Stripes, once posed a thought experiment. Take two songwriters. Give one a studio with a state-of-the-art mixing desk, a professional production team and all the time in the world. Put the other in a room for the weekend with a four‑track tape recorder and a guitar with a broken string. Who will write the better songs? The answer, of course: the guy with the broken string. Or as Plato put it in The Republic: necessity is the mother of invention. I have discovered to my cost, however, that while necessity may give a welcome boost to the creative process, it is not always sufficient. For example, my chicken gravy, made with sweet vermouth when I had no dry white wine to hand, was vile - I really should have known better. And my attempt at cooking an apple tart on the barbecue when the oven was broken was, as I have mentioned before in this column, a culinary low-point. Probably my least successful attempt at improvised cookery was when I was a teenager on a camping holiday. We ran out of food, so I rustled up a soup made from nettles and wheat, whipped from a nearby field, cooked over the fire in a coke can and seasoned with sea water. It sounds like a foraging menu somewhere Michelin-starred, but it tasted like stagnant pond-water.Upside-down cakes look beautiful and are so easy that even the messiest cook can create something jewel-like.Photograph: Jill Mead/Guardian I am happy to report that my collaborator, Jane Baxter, has had more success with camping-induced creativity. She recently helped out at the brilliant Root Camp (rootcamp.co.uk), which brings 15-21 year-olds together from all over the UK to teach them how to source, grow and cook their own food. They wanted to bake a cake to celebrate the end of a happy week's teaching, but they couldn't find a cake tin. All they had was an enormous cast-iron frying pan. Jane was completely unfazed. She flipped the pan around in her hands for a few moments, thinking. Then she whipped up a batter and made this wonderful upside-down cake. It may become the new Platonic Ideal for all cakes.
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Plum upside-down cake This is so good it makes cake tins seem decidedly unnecessary. You can add cinnamon to the cake mix for a bit of spice, or blueberries to the gaps in the plum topping for extra fruitiness. Preparation time: 15 minutes Cooking time: 50 minutes Serves 10 175g butter at room temperature 200g soft brown sugar, plus 2 tbsp 600g plums, halved and stones removed 1 tsp vanilla essence 3 eggs, separated 125g self-raising flour 100g ground almonds 1 tsp baking powder A pinch of salt 125ml milk
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1 Preheat the oven to 180C/350F/gas mark 4. In a small pan, melt 50g of the butter and mix with 2 tbsp of the soft brown sugar. 2 Line a 22cm cake tin with baking parchment. Pour the butter mix into the base of the tin and make sure it is well-covered. (If you are using an oven-proof frying pan, the butter can be melted in it). 3 Arrange the halved plums, skin-side down, in the bottom of the tin. Cream together the rest of the soft butter with the remaining sugar and vanilla essence until pale and fluffy. Separate the eggs, set the whites to one side and add the yolks one at a time to the creamed mix, beating well after each addition. 4 In a bowl, sift the flour into the remaining dry ingredients. Add this to the wet mix a third at a time, folding through with a little milk at each addition. In a separate bowl, whisk the egg whites just until they are soft peaks. Add a third of the whites to the cake mix, stirring through, before tipping in the rest and folding in gently. The cake mix should fall off a spoon easily.
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5 Spoon the mix over the plums and bake for 50 minutes, or until the top is firm to the touch or an inserted knife comes out clean. Remove from the oven and leave for about 10 minutes before turning out on to a plate. Serve warm or at room temperature. Recipe by Jane BaxterHenry's emergency upside-down apple tart One of the great things about upside-down cakes is they look so beautiful when turned out. Even the messiest cook can create something neat and jewel-like. I make this tart (with frozen puff pastry and apples from Costcutter) whenever I have people coming round and have forgotten to make a pudding. It looks like you toiled over it for hours.
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Makes 1 tart Juice and zest of 1 orange 6 tbsp golden brown sugar, plus 2 more for the top Seeds of 3 cardamom pods (crush the husks and shake out the little seeds) 5 apples 200g puff pastry1 Preheat the oven to 180C/350F/gas mark 4. In a medium-size saucepan, heat the orange juice and zest, along with 4 tbsp of sugar and the cardamom seeds over a medium heat until thick and bubbly. 2 Quarter the apples, cut out the cores then cut each of the quarters into three wedges, so you have 12 pieces altogether. Put the wedges into the pan and give them a good toss over the heat for around 2-3 minutes. Then pull them off the heat and set aside. 3 Roll out your puff pastry, and carefully lay it over the top of the apples while they are still in the frying pan. Sprinkle with the remaining 2 tbsp of sugar. 4 Place the pan in the oven for 30 minutes, or until the pastry has risen and turned golden. Leave to cool for 15 minutes and then turn out on to a plate. Henry Dimbleby is co-founder of the natural fast-food restaurant chain Leon (@henry_leon)You can add cinnamon to the cake mix for a bit of spice, or blueberries to the gaps in the plum topping for extra fruitiness. Photograph: Jill Mead/Guardian
