Apple Upside-Down Cake

As promised, here is a post about apple upside-down cake:

It all began several days ago, when I made banana bread. I thought to myself, “What would make this banana bread better?” The answer, of course, was maple pecan butter. Flavored butters are very easy to make. For this one, I pan toasted some lightly salted chopped pecans. Then I mixed the pecans with a couple tablespoons of maple syrup and most of a stick of butter. As I suspected, it was the perfect accompaniment to banana bread. It was also good on pancakes.

Anyway, I had a little bit of maple pecan butter left, and I needed to figure out something to do with it. I also had some apples. I decided that I wanted apple coffee cake. I decided I’d try to make it upside down, in hopes that it would look pretty for photography purposes.

I mixed up some batter. I don’t really bake, and I didn’t really have a recipe, but I used Bisquick on the theory that even if I messed up, I should have something vaguely biscuit-like. The batter I used was: 1 cup Bisquick, 1 egg, 1/4 cup milk, a couple tablespoons of sugar, a tablespoon or so of maple syrup, a bit of vanilla extract, and a dash or two of cinnamon. I slathered my leftover maple pecan butter on the bottom of an oversized ramekin, then artfully arranged the apples in a very pretty spiral pattern (which is totally not visible in the finished cake, unfortunately). After that I poured the batter on top.

I suspect if I had poured in about half the batter (so that it was an inch deep) it would have worked beautifully. Instead, I decided that there was room for the entire batch of batter in my one ramekin. So I poured all of it in there and stuck it in the oven, 350 degrees.

After half an hour, I went to check on it. It had . . . risen. Considerably. It wasn’t done in the middle, so I turned down the oven to 300 degrees and left it in there another 15 minutes or so. It kept getting bigger. It was like a giant muffin. By the time I took it out, it looked like this:

It seemed unwise to attempt flipping the cake over, what with the mighty domed top and all. But I wanted pretty pictures of cake, so I decided to slice the top off to create a flat surface. My intention was to photograph the sliced-off top of the cake, but it mysteriously disappeared (NOM NOM NOM) before I had a chance to do so.

Anyway, once the excess cake was trimmed from the top, the rest of it flipped out of the ramekin quite nicely. The spiral pattern of the apple slices was totally messed up by the process of pouring the cake batter in, but it still looked pretty good.

It tasted delicious. And if you still haven’t had enough pictures of cake, there are a couple more on flickr