Lime-peach upside-down cake: The experiment

So. I did it. You know, the experiment? With the limes and the peaches and the cake and whatnot that I mentioned I wanted to try yesterday? Yeah, I made a lime-peach upside-down cake, and as you will see, the experience had its ups and downs.

So I started with my go-to recipe for all the upside-down cakes I make and then made some modifications.

I zested two limes.

I melted six tablespoons of butter in my cast-iron skillet slowly over low heat.

I added a cup of brown sugar to the butter in the pan.

I juiced the two limes and added the juice to the sugar and butter in the pan.

I added a tablespoon of honey to the sugar, butter, and lime juice in the pan.

Then I let the mixture simmer on low heat until the sauce thickened.

While the lime caramel simmered in the pan, I started on the batter. First I beat six tablespoons of softened butter in my stand mixer until it was creamy.

Then I added a cup of white sugar to the butter and beat that until it was creamy.

I added the lime zest (about one tablespoon) and two eggs to sugar and butter and once again beat it until it was creamy. (It's funny how hard we have to work over our food sometimes. I imagine the molecules with little black eyes. Oh boy. Don't mind me.) Then I added a half teaspoon of vanilla extract. (Usually I scrape the seeds out of half a vanilla bean, but I couldn't find any in the cupboard, which is always overflowing with spices, some of which I don't use because I bought them in the heat of excitement over something or other).

Then I mixed one and a half cups of all-purpose flour, two teaspoons of baking powder, and a quarter teaspoon of salt in a bowl and measured out a half cup of milk. I proceeded to alternate adding milk and flour mixture to eggs, butter, sugar, etc. in the bowl. (About three measures of each and at low speed, otherwise the flour will fly up into a cloud and make you look like an old man, which is of course not a problem if you are an old man, but I am not yet, so I avoid it.)

The next step was to add the peaches to the caramel mixture in the pan. (I used frozen peach slices left from last year--there were about two peaches worth in the bag. The texture of the peaches was pretty mushy, so I would recommend fresh peaches or other fruit.)

I poured the batter on top of the peaches. Poured is generous, more like scraped and smeared. This batter is not runny, and it's not supposed to be. Try to spread it evenly over the fruit and caramel in the pan. (By the way, if you don't have a cast-iron pan, you can do this in an eight-inch cake pan. Just start your caramel in a thick-bottomed pan on the stove and then pour it into your cake pan. However, I think that you should run out and get a cast-iron pan; they are cheap, last forever, and incredibly wonderful to work with if you get a good season on them. Like now. Go. Run. I will wait for you.)

Put the pan into a 350-degree oven and set the timer for one hour and five minutes. Now, if you use eggs that you can trust, gorge yourself on every last morsel of batter that you can scrape out of the bowl. I literally made some kind of grunting Neanderthal noise while trying to shove my face into the bowl (with little success) to get every last molecule of this batter. It's that good. No. Really. Trust me on this.

OK, when the timer went off an hour and a half later I pulled the cake out of the oven (it turned out a little darker than usual, I probably should have pulled it out a little earlier). I placed the whole pan on a rack to rest for 30 minutes. Dum de dum de dum de dum. Twiddling fingers. Pacing.

Finally, it was time for the great reveal. I scraped around the edges of the cake with a butter knife to loosen it, and holding a plate on top of the pan, I flipped it over. I pulled up the pan. Nothing on the plate but a couple of crumbs. Hm. OK. Scrape around the edges again. Do the flip thing again, and, don't laugh, the thing comes out in big broken chunks.

Damn! Typical! I have made this cake so many times, and it has come out beautifully every time. The one time I want to show it off to the world, it turns out a big mess. Oh well. It tastes great. I am pretty sure it turned out such a disaster because the fruit was so mushy. If I had used fresh peaches (and perhaps more of them), it would have been beautiful.

Notes on the source recipe: For this recipe I eliminated the cinnamon that is usually added to the flour mixture. I didn't think that lime and cinnamon would be a happy combination. I also added lime juice to the caramel mixture. When I make this recipe with other fruits, I generally follow the recipe as is, minus the almond extract. I like almonds, but I've got a thing about almond extract and other almond-scented stuff. It just gives me the willies. I know, weird, right. Well, everyone has their hangups. I also detest celery and do all I can to avoid it.

Season's first grilling: Pork shoulder marinated in lime and orange juice

Some friends of ours came up from Richmond to have dinner with us on Saturday night. Of course, somehow we missed the memo that we were cooking dinner until Saturday morning, when we discovered this and became a tad anxious. Thankfully we still had a freezer full of meat (thanks to the Haskins Family Farm CSA we signed up for this year), so I decided to take a gamble and grill a nice piece of pork butt (which is actually the shoulder, but "pork butt" elicits more giggles) that was taking up a lot of space in the freezer and shred it for tacos. That way we could probably keep the kids happier than they would have been with some of my more esoteric meals.

But before I get too far into the details of making that dinner (which finally took place about two hours later than planned), I just have to mention this recipe for eggs poached in buttery sorrel sauce, which we had for dinner tonight and was absolutely wonderful. Thanks to Orangette for turning me on to it.

Anyway, back to the pork butt adventure, which at first seemed like it was going to be a fiasco, but turned out reasonably well in the end.

So, I had dinner to make out of a five-pound hunk of meat that needed to be defrosted and marinated and then grilled for at least three hours (or so I thought). I decided to take a chance and marinate the meat while it was defrosting. I made a marinade of

• lime juice from five limes
• 1/2 cup soy sauce
• 1 cup orange juice (delivered to us from South Mountain Creamery, which delivers our milk to us; yes, we get our milk delivered, and hearing the chink of bottles in the cooler on the front porch every Friday is wonderful, but more on that some other time)
• 3 Tbsp salt
• 1 tsp black pepper
• 1 Tbsp dried oregano
• 1 bunch cilantro, chopped finely (I actually got this from my back yard)
• 3 large garlic cloves, crushed
• 1/4 cup brown sugar

I mixed the ingredients together, placed the frozen pork butt in a plastic bag, and poured the marinade over it. I sealed the bag, pushing as much air out of the bag as possible, and then submerged the whole bag in cold water to try to speed defrosting. While it marinated, I turned it over a few times. I let it sit for about three hours (wish I had thought of it a lot earlier, an overnight soak would have been fantastic). 

At about three in the afternoon, I decided I had to start the grill or we were never going to have dinner. In another first, I decided to try my new chimney starter to start the fire. I wasn't sure if it was really going to work at first. It kicked up a LOT of smoke, but soon the coals glowed nicely, so I was happy. 

While the coals were heating up, I prepared the meat, which was still quite hard and cold, but I had to give it a try. I got the meat out of the bag (reserving the marinade), dried it off with some paper towels, and then rubbed it with a dry rub that I had left over from last summer (dry rubs usually include sugar, salt, dried mustard, cumin, and other dry spices).

Back at the grill, I poured the coals from the chimney starter into one half of my grill. (When you grill a large piece of meat, you use indirect heat, which means that if you have a coal-fired grill like I do, you place all the coals on one side, place the meat on the other side, and close the grill to basically create an oven.) Then I put the grate down, oiled it with some canola oil, and placed the meat on the grill, skin-side up. 

When the meat was on the grill, I decided to take a quick peak at my copy of Steve Raichlen's BBQ USA to get a sense of how much time I was looking at and how frequently I would need to add coals to maintain the heat in the grill. Of course, imagine my shock when he says that it's going to take four to seven hours, and our friends are expecting dinner in three. Oh dear. Well, hopefully it would be good enough to make up for the wait. 

In the meantime, I made a mild salsa with cherry tomatoes (organic from Florida, closest to home I can find right now), some local strawberries, a little spring onion, a sprinkle of salt, and a splash of red wine vinegar. 

After about an hour on the grill, I added 12 coals to the fire per Raichlen's instructions, but I wasn't thrilled with how low the fire had gotten in that hour, so I decided to add fewer coals more frequently (about six every half hour) to maintain the heat. (When you add coals, you want to leave the top off the grill for about five minutes to make sure they light up.) I also mopped the meat with the reserved marinade, which I had boiled for about five minutes to kill any bacteria that may have developed during the marinade.

And so it went. For about four hours, I added coals every half hour, mopped the meat with marinade, and anxiously watched the thermometer (I had pushed our meat thermometer into the thickest part of the meat and was aiming for 160 degrees). I knew I wasn't going to get meat that was falling-off-the-bone tender in the time frame that I had, but I sure as hell wasn't going to serve my friends undercooked meat. 

It was a long wait. Dinner didn't happen until about eight (half an hour past my four-year-old's bedtime). We had to feed the kids peanut butter sandwiches to tide them over. When dinner did finally happen, I set the candles on the table on fire, so things got a little chaotic but thankfully the house didn't burn down. But the tacos were delicious. The meat was incredibly flavorful, the salsa was juicy, tangy, and fresh. I'll definitely make it again, but next time I will start much, much earlier.