Wednesday, April 11, 2012

Peach Tatin Cake


This Peach Tatin cake is from Tish Boyle's "The Cake Book" and is one of the many cakes I intend to bake from her book as each recipe I've read so far just sounds absolutely mouth-watering.  This is supposed to be her cake interpretation of the French dessert Tarte Tatin which is an upside-down tart with caramelized fruits but of course when turned into a cake, it becomes another wonderful version of my much-beloved upside-down cake -- I think the numerous posts I've made on upside-down cake is further testament to my love for this oh-so-comforting cake.  I just love how fruit (my favorite thing to eat) is the main star of the show and just by changing the fruit or the combination of fruits, you feel like you're eating an entirely different cake altogether. 





The base of this cake is a sour cream butter cake made even more delicious with the added combo of spices namely cinnamon and ginger powder.  I've never tried U-D C with spices before so I was really excited to see how this combination would play out with the caramelized peaches.  I must say that the flavor combination was really good!  I couldn't really taste the ginger powder but the cinnamon with the peaches was really wonderful and the generous amount of vanilla extract (2 teaspoons) called for in the recipe also made the cake a notch yummier.  The topping makes use of a lot of sugar (1 cup) and butter which I didn't bother lessening as I really wanted a lot of fruit syrup to ooze down the cake which I knew the cake would eventually reabsorb, making it even more fruity and delicious!  I did however, lessen the sugar of the cake itself from 1 cup to 3/4 cup as experience tells me that 1 cup of white sugar on the base of an upside-down cake would just be too sweet.  I also placed the cake pan on top of a pre-heated baking stone while in the oven (one of the tricks I learned from Rose Levy Beranbaum's "Rose's Heavenly Cakes) and it really helped caramelize the sugar and give the topping a rich dark brown color.      



We really enjoyed this cake and I think the base of the cake itself would really work with mangoes which I'm very eager to try out.  I highly recommend eating this with whipped cream or vanilla ice cream....yum!

If you would like to make this cake Tish posted the recipe on Cookstr  :-)

2 comments:

  1. The peaches caramelized perfectly, the one time I tried tarte tatin the apples didn't even look a bit caramelized, I'll have to try this recipe and see if it works as nicely as it did for you!!!

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  2. That really does sound and look very yummy, Janis. I love U-C cakes and so far have tried apple, plum/blueberry, and pineapple. Peach sounds wonderful too, especially with spices added to the cake.

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