As many as you can carry home from Uncle Zachariah's orchard!
How nice would it be to live next to a peach orchard that you owned? Not bad, as far as I am concerned. Other than the troubles associated with pruning, early season freezing when the trees are in bloom, spraying for worms, borer insect damage, and rascals who think your peaches are there for the taking. Oh well....
When I
was just a tot, lots of folks grew peaches. Across the road from my
grandfather's barn was a turn-row separating two cotton fields and a shallow ditch that diverted run off water during big rains. For a farmer, a
turn-row (Used to turn the tractor around when discing, plowing, or
the cotton picker, during harvest time) is pretty much wasted
production space and probably painful to see every day. PaPa never
wasted anything he could avoid, so that turn-row contained three
ancient pecan trees and maybe ten peach trees. One thing you could
count on during peach season was an abundance of peaches for
pickled peaches, eating fresh peaches as a treat, and one of my favorite desserts, peach upside-down cake.
Grandma cooked her peach upside down cakes in a skillet, and I usually do too. She used as many peaches as she wanted in her cake, since the sideboard likely held fifty or a hundred peaches, depending on if she had pickled any yet. I do remember if you were having a good day, she might let you peel peaches for her, as long as you were skilled enough to keep the peels thin and not waste too much peach flesh as you peeled. She would cut the fruit into either wedges or chunks, depending on the stage of the moon or the frequency of dove calls in the earliest part of the morning, when she first got up to start her day or some other factor. I could never tell why she cut peaches the way she did, only that she cut them all the same and did not mind if you took some to put on your biscuit, or just to snack on while she worked. The thing I remember most is that she used a lot of peaches when she made her upside down cakes and how good they were.
For some reason, I decided to bake the version of her old recipe in a ceramic dish and not my trusty skillet. The taste is pretty much the same. This is a favorite treat for us during peach season. Sadly, the Isola farm, with all of the pecan and peach trees, was sold back in the 60's and we have no trees, so we buy our peaches from a fruit stand or the grocery store, or maybe from the back of a truck parked alongside Highway 49 south.
Here is how I do it.
Peach Upside Down Cake
Ingredients:
2 cups Frozen or
fresh peaches
3/4 cup unsalted butter, room temperature for cake layer
1/4 stick melted butter for peach layer
1 1/4
cup granulated sugar
4 large eggs
2 teaspoon vanilla extract
2
1/4 cups self-rising flour
3/4 cup buttermilk
3 Tablespoons
Butter for pan
3/4 cup brown sugar
Directions:
Peel peaches and cut into 1/2 inch wedges, or 1/2 to 1 inch chunks. I used frozen peaches out of the several packages we try to keep in the freezer. The juice from the fruit gives the cake a nice taste, so don't lose any if you are peeling fresh peaches.
Mix the thawed, or freshly cut peaches with brown sugar, cinnamon, cornstarch, and a quarter stick of melted butter in a bowl and set aside
Butter the cooking surface of a suitable oven dish, cake pan or cast-iron skillet. Coat the surfaces well. This will be important when the cake is turned out after baking.
Add room temperature butter and sugar to a mixing bowl and mix until well blended. I used a hand mixer for this cake, and it works fine.
Add eggs, one at a time, and mix well. The result should be a nice smooth and creamy sugar, butter and egg mixture.
Add and mix in the vanilla, and (hopefully) a little peach juice, or macerated peaches to the blend.
Add and mix in the buttermilk
Add and mix the flour to get a nice, slightly thick batter. I used Self rising flour. If using AP Flour, add 1 teaspoon of baking powder.
Add the peach mixture to the baking pan, then the batter. I try to
fully cover the peach layer.
Bake at 350 degrees F for 45 minutes to an hour, until the top has browned, and a toothpick inserted into the cake comes out clean.
Allow the cake to cool for 15 – 20 minutes then run a sharp knife around the edges to free the cake before turning it out of the pan. If the peach layer sticks, you did not butter the pan well enough and you will need to spoon the peach layer out and spread it over the cake. It won't look as pretty, but the taste will be the same.
Serve with whipped cream and enjoy.
I could eat this one at least one cake every two weeks. If I did, I would weigh 250 pounds and need some new bluejeans. At the moment, I weigh the same as when I finished basic training and I would like to keep it that way, so (sadly) this is a special treat.
Thanks for looking at my post.
God Bless you.
6 comments:
This recipe is useless in February man! Put it back in June - August.....
That makes me
That makes me drool! Peach pie makes a mighty fine breakfast, too. Yum.
We have some kind of native peach trees on our land or so I've been told, but are probably some ancient, long forgotten variety planted by early settlers. They are small, rather ugly, and taste sweeter than any peaches I've ever gotten from a farmers' market or store. They also are fairly insect resistant and have never developed any tree disease that we can see. We've never sprayed them with insecticide. As always, the weather determines whether or not we get peaches in any given year.
8:53 Folks like to talk about an "Easter cold snap". I think it is the evil one's attempt to deny us the pleasure of Peaches. I think big orchards turn on misty sprayers to coat the trees with ice, which is hopefully enough to avoid cold snap damage to the blooms. For my friend who (reasonably) tells me it is too early to write about peaches used in cakes, pies and turnovers, I verified we still have three packages of peached in the freezer. As for them, they can go to Tom's Fried Pies in Richland and sooth their peach cravings. In a bind I have used canned peaches. NOt as good, but the flavor is still great.
I'm 8:53 Many years ago, a large peach farm near the Terry exit on I-55 North burned hay bales placed around the orchard to keep the trees warm. The thick smoke drifted across the highway, obscuring visibility. There was a big pileup of vehicles and multiple deaths due to the lack of visibility. Long story short, the orchard owners were bankrupted and cut down all the peach trees as if from guilt. So, spraying water seems a much safer option than burning hay bales.
ZBPB this looks fantastic! However, I’m a lazy millennial so I typically just resort to making easy dump cakes using box cake mix
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