Peach Upside Down Cake & The Clandestine Cake Club in Reading

Last night I went to the Clandestine Cake Club in Reading, I've written about this lovely get together of cake enthusiasts a few times now and if you haven't seen my previous cakes you can have nosy through them here. I forgot my camera last month but was a bit more organised last night so I have a few photos of the other lovely cakes that I got to sample. Our them for this month was 'Bake Me A Song' at first this had me completely stumped and I even resorted to googling for songs with food in the title as I wanted to try and make some kind of connection between the song and the ingredients in the cake. After browsing a list of song titles, there's actually quite a lot when you stop to think about it, I struck gold with 'Peaches' by The Presidents Of The United States Of America. A song that I'm sure many of you will recognise for the line "millions of peaches, peaches for me". This was one of those moments where you realise that the solution was so obvious, the next thing I had to do was choose a recipe so this involved more googling for ideas. In the end I just went for a basic vanilla sponge recipe with some tinned peach slices and I baked it in the fancy tin I bought from Lakeland in the sales earlier in the year. I quite often bake decorated cakes for cake club but I wanted to do something a bit simpler but still attractive this time and thought upside down cake to showcase the peaches seemed like a good idea. I remember baking a pineapple upside down cake at school and I didn't like it. I don't know why as I like pineapples but it put me off upside down cakes for a long time. I seem to have overcome this now as I really enjoyed this cake and will be baking it on a regular basis as it so easy to do and also quite a cheap recipe. I cheated a bit by using tinned peaches but I always find it difficult to get nice fresh peaches this time of year so I'll have a go at using fresh peaches in the summer. Anyway it fits in with a line from the song "Peaches come from a can, they were put there by a man, in a factory down town".

The other cakes last night ended up being quite a varied selection and I was impressed that we all managed to come up with different songs. There was only one cake that I didn't get chance to try and that was a chocolate orange cake which looked very impressive but sadly I just can't stand the taste of orange in chocolate. Everybody else said it was a good cake though and by that point I was pretty caked out anyway!

The other cakes last night were from top left:
Chocolate cake with salted caramel - Song 'Sweet & Salty' by Covenant
Honey cake with honeycomb topping - Song 'Enter Sandman' by Metallica
Lemon cake - Song 'Lemon Tree' by Oasis
Chocolate cake with green buttercream - Song 'Running Up That Hill' by Kate Bush
Cherry cola cake - Song 'I Want You' by Savage Garden - this was baked by a fellow blogger who I met for the first time last night and you can read about the cake here
Chocolate orange cake - Song 'Lady Marmalade' by Labelle
Strawberry milkshake cake - Song 'Milkshake' by Kelis

There was also an orange and lemon cake which for some reason I didn't manage to take a photo of. A shame as it was a wonderful cake and even though I don't like orange, the lemon curd filling balanced it out and made it delicious.

Just in case you can't remember how the Peaches song sounds, here's a link to the video.

Ingredients
6 oz butter
6 oz caster sugar
6 oz self raising flour
3 eggs
1.5 tsp vanilla extract
3 tbsp peach juice from tin
1/2 tin sliced peaches in juice - the remaining peaches are quite nice with a bowl of porridge or cereal
1 dessertspoon demerara sugar

• Preheat the oven to 170C and spray a 21cm cake tin with cake release spray, or grease well with butter.
• Sprinkle the demerara sugar in the base of the cake tin and arrange the peache slices so the cut side is facing upwards (see photo)
• Put all of the remaining ingredients into a large mixing bowl and whisk together with an electric hand whisk until you get a smooth batter with no lumps. Spoon the mixture into the cake tin, taking care not to dislodge the peach slices. Bake for 55 minutes until an inserted skewer comes out clean. If the cake browns too quickly cover with foil, check the cake after about 30 minutes to see if it needs this.
• Let the cake cool in the tin for about 10 minutes then turn out onto a wire rack and leave until cold before sprinkling with icing sugar and serving.