This time it's an upside down plum cake with fine cornmeal. Outstanding. The recipe comes from one of my favorite baking books of all time, Rustic Fruit Desserts. I am trying to branch out more with this book, I tend to make the same 3 things repeatedly because they are just so good. This was a new recipe for me. I made it to the letter—only decreasing the 4 TBL of butter to 2 TBL for the bottom of the pan (for the fruit topping).
I am sad to report I did not have a great success with a recipe in the newest Martha (August) for a zucchini bundt cake. Not enough spice for my taste and too much zucchini, which affected the smell. It tasted fine, if bland even with double the amount of orange rind it called for. I did leave out the anise seed, which might have helped the flavor. It did smell funny. And I make zucchini cake/bread all the time without this problem —but with about half of the grated zucchini this called for. No one wants to smell a huge whiff of zucchini when they are eating cake. At least I don't. And the girls definitely don't. They already accuse me of making cakes weird by adding anything healthy to them. Pete says it's fine. I'm going to try another piece for breakfast and see if it's better the next day.*
I am ignoring the weather and pretending it's summer here. We did go berry picking at Smith Berry Farm yesterday and didn't get rained on, which was great. We were all wearing sweaters, however.
*update—Okay, it's totally fine. The zucchini smell is gone. Maybe I was smelling it while it was too fresh, or maybe it was the after-smell in the kitchen from it baking. I still would add more spices though.










