plum upside down cake | Real Food on the Table

This week has had us running in a million different directions.

I foolishly thought that with a little respite from water polo that I would have a few low-key, kick-back kind of days. Wrong. The Hubs non-chalantly announced at dinner on Sunday that there was an intensive soccer clinic going down this week and that Medium Little One would be there EVERY night.

But at least our mornings have been much more relaxed than usual. We’ve eaten pancakes together, done puzzles, played Monopoly, played in the sand box, fiddled in “the garden”. So my confession is that I have to try really hard on those slow paced mornings. I guess it’s time to come to grips with the fact that I’m simply not a stay in my jammies and lounge kind of gal. I make it until about 10:30 and then it’s like something just flips inside of me. I myself need to shower and get dressed. I need my small people showered, dressed, and coiffed. And then I start looking around at the sheer mess resulting from our lounging and I freak. I start tasking out orders and our leisurely morning comes to a grinding halt.

Oh, we may still have fun and relax over the course of the day, but that 10:30ish mark is just a breaking point for me. I need to know that “things are in order” and everyone has done what they need to do to start the day. Psychotic? Most definitely, but that’s just the way this girl is wired. All I can hope for is that my small people don’t undergo too much therapy later in life as a result of it. I can hear it now, “It was weird, we were having so much fun, playing Monopoly, when all of a sudden my mom’s head started spinning, her eyes rolled back in her head, and she started drilling out orders about everything that needed to be picked up, and gave us 10 minutes to get dressed and be presentable.” As I see it, I will have either created post-10:30-pajama-avoiders like myself, OR my progeny will be like those ones that you see in the bagel shop on Saturday morning living life in their PJs as if no one will notice or care.

Usually, after we switch gears and get “presentable”, we also launch into some kind of productive activity. Yes, productivity will be a whole other topic for adult-life therapy. I just keep telling myself, there could be worse evils, right? Anyway, this week, one of our productive activities together was to make this Plum Upside Down Cake. We bought a ton of plums and they all seemed to ripen at exactly the same time. Knowing we couldn’t possibly eat them all in time, I whipped out this recipe and off we went.

We started by mixing some butter, date palm sugar, and honey together in a skillet. The actual recipe called for brown sugar, but I was curious as to how the date palm sugar would substitute in. It didn’t melt as smoothly as brown sugar usually does, but the end result was just as good.

We poured that glaze into the bottom of a regular cake pan. Then I sliced up the plums into wedges and the little helping fingers arranged them in this lovely spiral pattern on top of the glaze.

After that, we mixed together some butter and sugar with the electric mixer. We added in a couple of eggs along with some almond extract and some vanilla.

We mixed together the dry ingredients which included flour, baking powder, cinnamon, and salt.

Then we alternated between adding the dry ingredients and milk to the butter and sugar mixture. When the batter was done, we spread it over the top of the plum swirl.

We popped it in a 350 degree oven and baked for about 55 minutes. We let it cool in the pan for 30 minutes after taking it out of the oven.

We ran a knife around the edges of the pan to unstick the gooey glaze. Then we inverted a platter on top of it and flipped out the cake.

It was surprisingly light and very tasty. We are still staring at a good amount of very ripe plums, so we may just be looking at a repeat dessert another night this week, and another little “productive activity”.