I was honestly ready to stop with the peach recipes(and focus on maybe other stone fruit like cherries), but my parents decided to gift me with a large bag of overtly ripe peaches, and I had to find a way to use them up(my dad suggested I make peach wine). While I did make a large amount of roasted peach-vanilla-honey puree with most of the peaches, I still had several stragglers I had to use up. So I thought about what else I could do with fruit that is already peach in flavor. And the idea of caramelizing the peaches in an upside down cake just sounded perfect. Now, caramelizing fruit in an upside down dessert is highly reminiscent of my forever trauma dessert, the tarte tatin. But that being said, this is an upside down cake. The fruit will need to be caramelized, and then baked with batter, and finally, inverted onto a plate to finish. Compared to a tarte tatin, the change is pastry with cake batter. What I like about an upside down cake is that there are so many built-in textures and flavors between the soft, fluffy sponge and the caramelized fruit, that you don’t really need a whole lot else to make this look appealing. And it is a versatile recipe that you can sub a lot of seasonal fruit with, making it a pretty convenient base for a multitude of desserts!

For my recipe, I wanted to pair the peaches with olive oil cake specifically. I LOVE the combination of olive oil cake with stone fruit. Olive oil has a grassiness to it that works well with sugar, and peaches can be tart and fragrant, which contrasts with olive oil nicely. In terms of recipe difficulty, this one is not too bad actually. The caramel layer is probably the trickiest part, just because you don’t want to completely burn your sugar for this, but you do want to take it dark. Take your time with this step, just to make sure you don’t mess it up. After that, the cake batter itself is pretty easy to bring together. It does have pistachio and Meyer lemon in it, just because those ingredients accentuate the olive oil beautifully, but outside of that, you literally just need to dump the ingredients in a bowl, mix them together, and you have cake batter. This cake does take 50 minutes to bake, so something to consider too, since this is not necessarily a quick-baking cake. This is because the quantity of peaches does extend the baking time in the batter, but the end result is a cake that is soft and tender in the center, has really caramelized edges, and juicy, bitter-sweet-tart peaches. I actually ate the whole cake across 5 days on my own, it was that good!

Makes 1 10-inch cake, or 8 servings:
For the caramelized peach layer:
1 cup granulated sugar
a pinch of salt
6-8 yellow peaches, pitted and quartered

In a nonstick pan, start by heating up the sugar and salt until the sugar turns an amber brown color – it should register to about 375 degrees F. Line a 10-inch cake pan with parchment and cooking spray. Pour the caramelized sugar into the pan, and then layer the peaches, sliced side down, into the caramel.

For the olive oil cake:
1 cup all-purpose flour
1/4 cup ground pistachio
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 cup granulated sugar
2oz olive oil
4oz whole milk
1 egg
2 tbsp Meyer lemon juice
1 tsp Meyer lemon zest
1 tsp vanilla extract
a pinch of salt

In a bowl, mix everything together until a batter forms. Pour the batter onto the peaches in the cake pan. Bake at 350 degrees F for 50 minutes. Allow the cake to cool slightly before flipping onto a plate and serving.