Modification Mondays: Orange-Spice Upside Down Cake

"You know when you start with one recipe and then end up with something totally different? Or start with a vision in your head they you can’t find a recipe for, so you find 3 or 4 recipes that are sort of similar and awkwardly mash them together, with a bit of your own flare? Or have to adapt well-loved favorites to new dietary restrictions? Or look at old stand-bys and think: “This should totally have bacon. Or tomatoes. Or bourbon.”? Yeah, the Modification Mondays series is for you. Don’t worry, we don’t expect you to follow our recipes either."

Do you ever buy a bag of oranges, eat two of them, and then think to yourself, "Okay, now what the hell am I going to do with the rest of these oranges?" Anybody? No? Well anyway, I do that at least once a year, and then I either force myself to eat them and get thoroughly sick of oranges, or throw them away and feel super guilty. Either way, it sucks. So this time, I said to myself, "No, I will find something delicious to do with these oranges, and it will be amazing!" And, well, not to brag or anything, but I kinda did.

My basic idea was a pineapple upside down cake, but with oranges. I found a basic pineapple upside down cake recipe in the Red Plaid Cookbook, as well as a recipe for something called citrus cake. I also found a recipe for maple-glazed pineapple upside down cake in The Old Farmer's Almanac Everyday Baking, which a friend who knows me very well got me for Christmas last year. So I took all those recipes, sat down with a pencil and Google, and set about smooshing them together and modifying for maximum orangey goodness.

The working copy, stuck on the fridge for optimal accessibility.

The cake part is pretty standard yellow cake, except I added a bunch of cloves and put some orange juice (fresh squeezed!) in with regular milk instead of using buttermilk. I also added some orange zest (freshly zested from the peels of the oranges I just juiced!).

Protip: Zest the orange peels, not your hands.

It's worth noting that you can significantly cut down your prep time by using store-bought orange juice and orange zest, and I wouldn't judge you at all for doing so; that just wouldn't have contributed to my goal of using up as many oranges as possible. I used two oranges for juice and zest, and then I sliced two more for the upside down topping, leaving only two more for me to force down my gullet (or suck it up and juice them for breakfast).

You mix together the cake batter pretty much like normal cake batter; start by creaming together the butter and sugar. (An electric mixer will be helpful here, but an industrious baker can do it by hand if they're dedicated.) I made a rookie mistake and realized halfway through my prep work that I didn't have enough butter for both the cake and the topping, so I substituted mashed banana and a touch of vegetable oil for the butter in the cake. This added a subtle banana-y flavor to it that wasn't bad, but it's not exactly what I was going for, so I'm leaving it out of the official recipe, since it was a last-minute substitution instead of an intentional modification.

Anyway, once the butter and sugar are creamed, add in the other liquid ingredients. (If you're using fresh orange zest, add that in here, too. If using store-bought, you can put it in with the dry ingredients.) Mix together the dry ingredients in a separate bowl, then add them to the wet ingredients and mix it all together.

Now, for the fun part - the topping! For the orange slices, peel before slicing, and make sure you get as much of the white stuff off as possible. Slice the oranges side-to-side, and slice the top and bottom off very thinly and discard to get rid of all the nasty white stuff where the ends of the sections come together.

If you have a 10-11 inch cast iron skillet, now's the time to break it out. If you don't, you can use a small saucepan for this part and bake the cake in a 9-inch square baking dish instead. It'll still be good, but it might lack a certain je ne sais qua. (Actually, the edges will be slightly less crisp. That's really the only difference.)

Melt the rest of the butter in the pan and stir in the brown sugar and maple syrup. If using a baking dish, pour it in and spread it over the bottom. If you're already in the cast iron skillet, carry on. Lay out your orange slices in a single layer in the butter/sugar/syrup mixture. Sprinkle some raisins in the spaces between them.

Pour the batter in on top and stick that sucker in a 350° oven for 35-40 minutes or until the cake tests done.

Turn the cake over onto a heat-proof platter...

 Or pizza pan - y'know, whatever you've got on hand.

 Let it cool as long as you can stand to, then slice, serve, and enjoy!

Orange-Spice Pineapple Upside Down Cake

Prep/Cook Time: 1.5 hours (less if you use store-bought orange juice and zest)

Servings: 8

Ingredients:
(US Customary)

Cake

• 1/2 c. butter
• 3/4 c. sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1/3 c. milk
• 1/3 c. orange juice
• 1 tsp. vanilla extract
• 1 Tbsp. molasses (If you don't have any, you can leave it out without dire consequences)
• 2 Tbsp. grated orange peel
• 1 1/2 c. flour
• 1 1/2 tsp. baking powder
• 1/2 tsp. baking soda
• 1/2 tsp. salt
• 1 tsp. cloves (this gives you a pretty strong flavor; if you're not a huge fan of cloves, you can cut it to 1/2 tsp., use cinnamon instead, or just leave it out altogether)

Topping

• 1/4 c. butter
• 2 Tbsp. maple syrup
• 3/4 c. brown sugar
• 2 medium oranges, peeled and sliced horizontally
• 1/4 c. raisins

Special equipment: Juicer and zester or box grater (use smallest side) if using fresh orange juice/zest. Electric mixer useful but not essential. Cast iron skillet optional.

Instructions:

1. Cream together 1/2 c. butter and sugar. In a separate container, mix together milk and orange juice. To butter/sugar mixture, add eggs, milk/OJ mixture, vanilla, molasses, and orange peel. Mix well.

2. In a separate bowl, mix together flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and cloves. Add to butter etc. and beat to combine.

3. Melt 1/4 c. butter in cast iron skillet, if using. (Otherwise use a small saucepan). Stir in maple syrup and brown sugar.

4. If using separate baking dish, pour butter/sugar/syrup in and spread over the bottom. Otherwise leave it in the skillet. Lay orange slices in a single layer. Scatter raisins in the spaces between.

5. Pour cake batter over oranges. Bake at 350°F for 35-40 minutes or until the edges of the cake are pulling away from the sides of the pan and the cake tests done. Turn cake over onto a heat-proof platter, cool, slice, and serve.

Autumn Stew/Roasted Squash Seeds

I believe I have mentioned before my love affair with winter squashes; I also shared a recipe that requires a partial can of pumpkin. In furtherance of my addiction to squash (and to give you something to do with the rest of that can of pumpkin), I concocted a stew that is, as far as I'm concerned, the season of autumn, condensed into one Crock Pot full of autumnal goodness. (I've done this before, with slightly different results; if you're curious, you can check out the post on my personal blog that I haven't updated in like a year now. This one is more creamy and less sweet, but they're definitely related.)

To start, gather every autumn-y food thing you can find, plus some other stuff:

The main things here are the butternut squash, sweet potatoes, apples, and sausage. But the other stuff's important, too.

Pumpkin-Raisin Bread

I mentioned on Facebook awhile back, and I fully believe this to be true: when Jesus said "Man cannot live on bread alone," I'm pretty sure he was forgetting about pumpkin bread. It is, as far as I'm concerned, the perfect quick bread: sweet enough to spread on a little cream cheese frosting and call it dessert, but healthy enough to butter it and eat it for breakfast instead (or lunch, or dinner, or elevensies, or afternoon tea, or whenever you damn well please).

This recipe is slightly modified from one I found in The Red Plaid Cookbook, which I inherited from my mother, and is the cookbook of the gods:

Don't be fooled by the cover; all true disciples know that this is actually called "The Red Plaid Cookbook". (All true disciples being my mother and me.)

Their recipe is for pumpkin-nut bread, but I think it's better without the nuts. I also used slightly different seasonings, because I am very opinionated when it comes to pumpkin-flavored things. Anyway, let's begin.

I think a couple of the seasonings are missing here. That, or they're hidden behind the pumpkin and salt. I'm bad at photography.

Stuffed Acorn Squash

Have I mentioned my enormous love for winter squashes?

It's a little ridiculous. As soon as those things hit the grocery store shelves in September, I start stockpiling for the squashpocalypse.

Artist's rendering

My favorite way to eat just about any winter squash is roasted or mashed and doused with butter and maple syrup, but given the large amounts of squash in my house, I figure I have to mix it up now and again to avoid the diabeetus. (Also lest my husband stage a squash-madness- induced revolt.)

So one of my other favorite things to do with squash is to stuff it. There's a lot of leeway, as far as what tastes good stuffed into a squash, so here I'll just put the combination I came up with most recently. Feel free to get inspired and experiment with whatever you have on hand.

Mushroom and Bacon Casserole

I found this recipe in my Cooking Light magazine and couldn’t resist trying it. This could easily be altered to be meatless, though I did enjoy the bacon! It does require some chopping and work, but it’s a filling, warm winter dish!

Before baking in the oven (the heat of the dish had already mostly melted the cheese!).

Ends & Bits: Non-Fussy Pot Pie + Bonus Gin Cocktail

Refrigerator empty? Cupboards bare? Need to stretch the wilty remains of last week’s grocery run until next payday? Toss all those little ends and bits in a pan and make something delicious! This series explores the skill set of just “throwing together” a meal by looking at what you have available to work with and going from there. This takes a willingness to experiment and a bit of a knack for knowing what will taste delicious together. It also helps to have plenty of practice and exposure to a wide varieties of recipes with potential variations. It is in this spirit that we run our regular Ends & Bits series.

So I was having one of those days where nothing sounded good for dinner so I just didn't eat until I got a headache, realised I was being dumb, and decided I had to cook something. So I started with the advice of my old pal Carmel: Fry some onions. Just fry some onions and see where you end up.

I think this was original conveyed as a metaphor or life as well. Profound, yo.

So I started cutting up my onions to fry and realised we had bacon. Lots of bacon. "American-style" bacon even.

Spoiler: Australia does a lot of things really, really well. Bacon is not one of them. The "American-style" bacon my housemate found is an improvement. But... it tastes like the person who made it asked, "How is American bacon different than Australian bacon?" and then made it based off the answer without ever really trying American bacon.

 Anyway, I decided that the only thing better than frying onions was frying onions IN BACON, so I cut up some bacon along with my onion and started frying them all together and pondering what  I wanted this to end up as. About this point, I decided what I really wanted was a pot pie. Completely weather inappropriate to me, but it sounded delicious.

So I started doing a quick internet search for pot pie recipes and I was... underwhelmed by the results. They were all super fussy... Buy store-bought puff pastry and prepare it according to the instructions! Roast the vegetables first! Use only these exact vegetables! Then braise them slowly on the stovetop for four million hours! Make a roux separately and add it to the veggie slowly or you will ruin everything! Etc. And I just could not be fussed.

So I decided to just throw things together and see what happened. What happened was delicious:

Seriously delicious.

It takes a little bit of time to come together, but is incredible unfussy as a recipe. This is basically a "template" recipe--no strict ingredients, just vague proportions. (Thanks to Jules at The Stonesoup for the terminology of template recipes...they're basically the way I think about cooking.) The butter/margarine and some kind of flour are pretty essential, but everything else negotiable. Throw in whatever you have around!

Family Tradition: Green Potatoes

So as some of you may be aware Erik and I bough a house. We moved in to it on Monday and hosted Thanksgiving dinner on Friday. (Yes, yes we know Thanksgiving is on Thursday, but since most people only get Thursday and Friday off and many had to travel from far away it made sense to celebrate on Friday.  Also we needed that extra day.)  We had many of the traditional Thanksgiving dishes: turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, green beans,  pies my mother made, and green potatoes. Wait, green potatoes?  People have heard about green eggs and ham, but when I mention green potatoes it usually doesn't ring a bell.  For the uninitiated, green potatoes are a Dutch tradition from Erik's mother's family.  And as the new bride I really wanted my Mother-in-law to be impressed with my ability to feed her son, so green potatoes were definitely on the menu (even though it meant we would have two potato dishes on the table).