Peach-Jalapeño Upside Down Cake 🍑

Hello, hello. We are going to dive right back into an upside-down cake, and I say back into it because I have done this recipe on YouTube before, but I've got some changes for this one. First of all, it is the height of peach season, my favorite season here in Chicago. Southwestern Michigan is famous for its peaches, so I've purchased these from some of the local farmers here, and we are going to make an upside-down cake that's got a couple of twists, and then the cake part of it is an olive oil cake that's a little bit richer than what I've shown you before, and one that I'm just crazy about right now. So we've got ripe peaches here. When I was growing up, I grew up in Oklahoma. I think probably a lot of you know that, and that my folks had a barbecue restaurant, but one time every summer, we would go with our grandmother, all the grandkids would, down to Paul's Valley, and we would buy bushels and bushels of peaches. Well, we wouldn't just buy them. We would go out and pick them and then bring them back, and over the next several days, we would can peaches, make peach butter, make pickled peaches, everything circled around peaches, and then for the rest of the year, especially the rest of the wintertime, that would be what we would eat. So I'm very partial to peaches because they played a really big role in my growing up. Now, these are not cling peaches. We have gone through the cling peaches here, and then now we're in the, what they call the freestone peaches. So I'm just cutting them long like that, and then peeling or prying them away from that pit. I'm gonna go ahead and go through all of these. I'm trying to change. I love this little knife. This is what they sometimes call a bird's beak knife, and it works really good for any kind of peeling, and this particular one is nice enough that I can actually sharpen it. It's got enough of a blade, and so then I can just go around like that and start to peel these guys off. So I'm gonna go through all of these now. Okay, you need to have the pan that you're gonna cook this in. Now, I'm not doing it in a cake pan. That's certainly permissible, but I'm doing it in a nonstick skillet because it just makes everything go really easy and fast, but you have to make sure that your nonstick skillet has a handle that can go into the oven. I've put the butter in here. I've set it over a kind of medium-high heat, and I'm gonna melt that butter, sort of swirling it around, and I'm gonna let it cook here until it turns that kind of what we would call a chestnut brown. So it's gonna be fully brown, not just light golden, but also we don't want it to burn at all. Once it hits that, I'm gonna sort of stop the cooking, even though I'm gonna keep it over the fire, by adding the sugar. So you're gonna wanna have the sugar right beside you there. You'll notice that the butter foams a lot as it is melting, here, and in just, I will say, about a minute or so, it's going to start browning. Okay, the foam is subsiding some, and you can see that the milk solids of the butter are starting to brown nicely here. Just a couple more seconds. I always use my old factory scents here because it smells so good, but it smells like brown butter. That's what we're looking for because the flavor of brown butter carries through anything really beautifully. So you notice no more, not very much foam there, and a nice light, a nice rich brown. I'm sprinkling the sugar over the top of that. And then I'm going to do something that's just kind of a little wacky here. I'm gonna slice up a jalapeno chili and sprinkle that over the top. Now, this isn't something that you have to do, but I will tell you that peaches, or even mangoes, if you choose to use that fruit here, is really, really good with jalapeno. Okay, so we're sprinkling that over there. Now I'm gonna put a little bit of, I'm gonna use this one here, of lime zest on here. So just roll your lime around as you take that off. Now all of the peaches go in on top here. And once they're all in, we will let them cook for just a few minutes until they release their juices. Look at how beautifully juicy that looks. Now I'm gonna turn that off. Another little addition that I like to make to this, especially to this peach one, is to put some herbs from my garden or something that I buy at the farmer's market on here. I've got several different choices. So why don't we just go out to the garden and I'll show you what they are. Well, this is really my happy place here. And I'm surrounded by really gorgeous herbs. So this is mint. I'm sure you recognize that. I grow it in a pot because I don't want it to take over the whole garden. That is a perennial. So is this. This is lemon balm. If you've never grown lemon balm, it grows really, really vigorously and really lovely. And it will come back year after year. And it's got that lovely lemony flavor. Now, maybe you don't know this one. This is anise hyssop. It's one of my favorite herbs. It has an anise flavor, but it has got these gorgeous purple blossoms and the bees just love it. But the one that I kind of came out here to get is this one over here. This is lemon verbena. It is so beautiful. And man, the aroma of it is just breathtaking. But don't overlook the use of basil as well here because basil could be really good, giving a sort of savory note. For our cake today, I am going to cut a bunch of this lemon verbena just because it smells so good to me right now. I'll meet you back in the kitchen. Boy, this stuff just makes the kitchen smell so good. I'm gonna strip the leaves off of the... The lower stems here are way tougher than the upper stems. So I'm just gonna kind of pull the upper stem off with the top little bits and pieces here like that. And then I'm gonna give it a chop, but not a very fine chop because it will be nice to see these little pieces of the lemon verbena. And so just kind of cutting crosswise on these leaves at about quarter inch. Okay. And there we go. All that will go on now over all of these peaches and that will perfume them beautifully. But any of those herbs out there would perfume these so beautifully. Okay, now it is on to making the cake part of it. So this is, as I said at the beginning, an olive oil cake. So I've measured out the flour already. This is a cup and a half of flour. I always go by weight. For me, that's 210 grams. And I really do work with a scale when I'm baking because it's the most accurate and gives me great consistency. To that, I'm gonna add a cup full of sugar. You may wonder why it's sort of an off white color there. It's almost like a tan color. It's because it's organic sugar. It has more flavor, way more flavor. And I'm not just saying that. It really does have way more flavor. Two teaspoons of baking powder. I'm gonna add a half a teaspoon of salt to this. So sprinkle that over the top of it. And then whisk the dry ingredients to combine them. One thing I love about this cake is that it's a two-bowl cake. And that means that you can just use two bowls. You don't have to use an electric mixer or nothing like that and a whisk. Everything is done very simply in this one. Now, what I want you to see here is what I've already got going here. This is 2 1⁄3 of a cup of sour cream and 2 1⁄3 of a cup of olive oil. You can use Greek yogurt in this. I have done that. Oh, the little dark stuff at the bottom there is I put a splash of vanilla, a couple teaspoons of that. And then I'm going to put two eggs in here and then whisk all of that until it is completely... Now, that one's not wanting to open, but you've had that problem at your house too, I'm sure. There it is, okay. I got that all there. Okay, now then, I'm going to whisk this until it's completely smooth, which is essential. And I will tell you, that's why I love this recipe so much because it does come together really easy, as opposed to butter cakes and all. This olive oil cake is way easier. And then I'm just going to put all of the dry ingredients in and then using small movements here, start to incorporate the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients until they're pretty much all incorporated. So this is a very tender cake. And that little savoriness that you get from the olive oil is beautiful in this particular version of the upside down cake. So using a spatula, I'm going to just dollop this all over the top so that it's evenly distributed. It's hard to just dump this out and then spread it. It doesn't want to spread evenly. So just do it in dollops like that. Now, got all the batter here and I've got the top covered. I'm going to give it just a very gentle smoothing here. Got my oven at 350 degrees now. And I'm going to put it in here and bake it until there is resilience to the top of the cake. That'll take me about 35 minutes or so. Okay, time is up, but I want to check it and I want to show you that part of it. I will say this bubbled over a little bit and spilled onto the floor of the oven. So you might want to bake this on a baking sheet. Now it's beautifully browned evenly side to side, but right in the center, I'm touching it. Now, a lot of people would use a toothpick to go in, but I always do the touch method. You can test it on the side where you know it's ready. Okay, and then touch it in the center. It should be just a touch soft, but not very soft at all. Now, in order to unmold this beautifully, we got to wait for five minutes, at least, maybe seven minutes for it to cool off a little bit so that it will unmold in a single piece. It won't have a tendency to break up. Okay, first things first here, I want to make sure that there's nothing sticking on the sides of this. So I take a small knife and go around there because if anything is sticking, it'll just tear when you try to unmold it there. So just make sure it's, and then I kind of shake it in the pan to make sure that it's, it is, I think I'm not going to put that. It's still pretty hot. So I'm going to do it this over here, I think, and put the plate that I'm going to unmold it on like that. And then I grab it this way. And I know this will seem kind of weird, but this is the easiest way for me to do it. And that is to go up over my head like that and then bring it back down. That gives me a full swing, if you will. And let's take this out of here. We can see if it came out nicely. It looks like it's going to be a little off center here. But it came out beautifully. Okay, look at that. Okay, so I'm just going to put these up back into place, shall we say. And there you go. It's steaming hot and beautiful. I'm going to let it cool off a little bit more, and then I would slide it a little bit more toward the center. But I'll tell you that this, my favorite way to do this is to get the fruit ready, get the batter ready. Let people sit down to dinner and put this in the oven so that they can have it hot out of the oven. This will need another probably 10 minutes or so to cool off, but still be warm before you have it. And you got something pretty special. Now, if you really want to make it something special, then you might want to just dribble a little bit of tequila or some white rum over the top of it. Let that soak in. If it's a special occasion, I mean, it's gilding the lily. This is already something really special.