Blood Orange Upside Down Cake

This Blood Orange Upside Down Cake can use any fruit you want -- but this one uses the fresh citrus flavors from blood oranges on top of a vanilla cake with a syrupy glaze. It's like pineapple upside down cake, but even better.

Do you ever just wake up and think there's a cake you have to bake? This is the second time I've done this this month (the first being this Bailey's Chocolate Poke Cake from NYE).

I've been reading about Little Plantation's Eat, Capture, Share photo challenge to stretch my photography skills (hers are just insane!), and the first challenge is citrus. I took pictures of all the citrus I had in the house -- grapefruit, limes, lemons, satsuma madarins, navel oranges, and blood oranges (so basically everything, right?!). None of the pictures turned out remotely good. Screw this, I thought. I'm baking something beautiful with these oranges and hence, there's a Blood Orange Upside Down Cake on the blog tonight.

'Tis the season for blood oranges

Blood oranges are so flavorful and winter is the only time to snag them. You can typically find blood oranges in the grocery store from December until February or March.

These oranges have a naturally red color thanks to anthocyanin. No artificial dyes or colors in this cake. A word of warning though: the vanilla cake mixed with the deep red juice from the blood orange makes for a golden, almost slightly green color of cake. This doesn't bother me in the least because I love olive oil cake which has the same hue, but if this bothers you, you can always add some pink food dye OR just leave out the juice entirely. Replace the juice with 1 teaspoon of orange zest to keep the citrusy flavor in the cake.

Use any Fruit for the Cake

This upside down cake recipe is incredibly versatile and can be used with any fruit you have on hand. The cake itself is a standard yellow cake recipe. You'll just substitute the blood orange juice for the juice and/or zest of the fruit of your choice. If you're wanting a pineapple upside down cake, use ¼ cup of pineapple juice and use pineapple slices on top, for example.

You could do an apple upside down cake, peach upside down cake (omg I love peaches!), pear upside down cake, banana upside down cake, you name it. All are equally as easy to make and again, follow the basic recipe below.

How to make a blood orange upside down cake

You've got 4 easy steps and voila, you've got yourself an upside down cake:

1. Grease and line 9" cake pan (that's at least 2" in height) with parchment paper. Spray or great parchment again. Pour melted butter and light brown sugar all over the bottom of the pan.
2. Place thinly sliced (⅛" thick) blood oranges on top of melted butter and brown sugar. Set aside.
3. In a large bowl, combine wet ingredients. In a medium size bowl, combine your dry ingredients. Stir dry ingredients slowly in to the wet ingredients until well combined.
4. Gently pour batter over blood oranges, making sure batter is evenly spread. Bake in the oven for about 40-45 minutes!

Flipping the Cake to Make it an "Upside Down" Cake

This may be the hardest part of this entire recipe because it's difficult to be precisely patient and wait EXACTLY 10 minutes -- NO SOONER OR LATER! I'm yelling because this is critical. If you flip your pan over too soon, the cake doesn't have time to set and the whole thing will come apart. If you flip your cake any later, the toppings will stick to the top of the pan and may not come out neatly.

I've found that 10 minutes is pretty much the magic time period to wait before flipping your cake onto a cake plate or flat platter.

Other Recipes with Blood Oranges

Check out some of these other recipes using blood oranges if you find yourself loving them or in excess:

• Here's some dinner inspo with blood oranges -- just roasting them with your chicken. Genius!
• Blood Orange cocktails? With rosemary? Of course I need a cocktail to get me through the rest of winter.
• Popsicles in the winter time? I'll try them!

xox

kathryn