Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
All right. Are you guys ready to see the world's fastest upside-down cake?
(Audience) Yeah.
Okay. Great.
So traditionally, upside-down cake is quite difficult to make.
You've got to make the dough out of butter, flour, and sugar.
Again, not so healthy.
You don't want it too tough, so it's tricky to kind of knead the dough just enough.
And then you've got to caramelize the fruit without burning it,
and then you've got to layer everything and bake it without burning it.
And then inverting it is kind of hard to get it to not stick.
So it can be quite complicated.
But raw upside-down cake is incredibly easy.
It's just so easy.
So the first step is--I'm going to be using berries here.
And I showed you a picture of the pineapple cake.
You can really use any soft fruit.
So I like berries; I like pineapple; I like mango; I like plums.
Any soft fruit can make a good upside-down cake.
I'm using a mixture of berries, and that's why it's called jumbled berry upside-down cake.
So we've got sliced strawberries; we ve got raspberries; we've got blueberries in here.
But you could use any kind of berry you'd like--blackberries.
You could use one kind of berry if you just want a strawberry upside-down cake.
Whatever you want to do.
So the first step is I want to macerate this fruit.
Remember, that means to marinate the fruit in a little bit of sweetener to bring out the juice.
Now I'm not going to add any lemon to this because the berries are already kind of tart,
whereas if I were making--and so is pineapple, so is mango.
If I was making a plum upside-down cake or apple, I might add some lemon.
But we're just going to add some sweetener.
This is a little bit of agave nectar.
And I'm just going to stir that around.
And it's going to get really, really juicy in just a minute,
almost like I cooked it on the stove with a little bit of cornstarch and white sugar.
It's going to be that same kind of effect where it's going to get really juicy
and even thicken a little bit here.
So we'll just stir that around and let that sit for a few minutes while we
prepare the rest of the cake.
And it smells really good.
Berries are almost out of season, so I'm glad we can still make
this cake one more time.
And then you can switch to other kinds of fruits later on in the year.
Okay. All right. So we've got that all mixed together.
Can people see how that's already getting a little bit juicy and soft?
And that'll continue to happen in the next few minutes as I just let it sit.
Okay. So we ve got those berries tossed.
So now I'm going to turn to the food processor and make the batter for the cake,
and this is the shortbread crust recipe in the book that I mentioned that's so versatile.
It's the basis for cakes, crumbles, crisps.
It's pie crusts; it's tart crust.
So I'm going to start with some walnuts.
These walnuts have not been soaked.
Let me just mention that for a second.
A lot of raw food recipe books you see will say to soak the nuts,
and that's for a couple of reasons.
For some recipes, it's a culinary reason because if it's going to be blended
into a very creamy sauce or pudding, you want the nuts soaked so they're smooth.
And then also for health reasons, soaking your nuts helps make them
a little bit easier to digest, breaks down the fats, releases enzyme inhibitors,
breaks down the proteins, makes them a little easier to digest.
But I'm just really concerned with the culinary aspect of this, and so I want it to taste the best.
And in cakes, cookies, and pie crust, it would be very soggy if I used soaked nuts,
so they really do need to be dry.
Some raw food recipe books will tell you to use soaked and
dehydrated nuts when they want a dry nut.
That's just too much work for me, so I'm just going to use dry nuts
when I want them dry and soaked nuts when I want them creamy.
So that's the reasoning behind that.
So we'll go ahead and add that.
Then I'm also going to add some dried, shredded coconut,
and that's going to make this cake lighter than if I just used nuts.
It just kind of lightens it up,
so it's going to resemble more of a flour when I grind these two together.
I'm also going to add a little bit of salt, and it might seem strange to use salt in desserts,
but a little bit of salt in most desserts really helps bring out all the other flavors.
It really grounds it, gives it some depth.
And in crusts and cakes, it tends to make it taste a little buttery.
Adding a little salt gives a kind of buttery flavor to it.
So we'll go ahead and add just a little pinch of salt there.
That's just a little too much.
Okay. And then I'm just going to process that until it resembles a flour.
And I'll go ahead and give this one more stir while that's happening.
All right, great.
So you're just looking for a coarse flour here.
Can everybody see that? Okay. It s like a coarse flour.
Now I'm going to go ahead and add Medjool dates, and dates are a dried fruit.
Medjool dates are a particularly soft and sweet variety of date.
I like using them as opposed to other dates because, since they're larger,
it doesn't take as long to remove the pits.
And to remove the pits, all I did was just pull it apart and pull out the pit.
It just takes a second.
And so we'll add those in.
And what these dates are going to do is, in addition to sweetening the cake,
they're also going to bind it together.
They're going to function like egg would; they're going to bind it.
So we'll go ahead and add those dates, and then I'm just going to
process that until it begins to stick together a little bit.
Take a look at that.
And basically, what we re looking for--
I'm going to process it a little more; I still see some big pieces of date.
I just want it to stick together when I press it between my thumb and fingers,
and it's almost there, but I'm just going to process it a little bit longer.
All right, that looks great.
Okay.
So now we're ready to assemble this cake.
So first what I'm going to do, I started off with a nine-inch cake pan.
The recipes in my book call for a six-inch cake pan, and the reason for that is I know
that these ingredients can be a little bit expensive
and you don't always want a huge cake.
So you can get six-inch cake pans at cookware stores online just as easily as nine,
even though they re not as common as the nine-inch.
And I did that just so that you could make a smaller cake,
and it can still be nice and tall and impressive with using less ingredients.
If you want to make an eight- or a nine-inch cake, which is more standard,
just double the recipes in my book or even multiply them by two and a half
if you want a really nice, tall cake.
So the first thing I've done is I've lined this pan--
--I'm doing a nine-inch just so there's enough for everybody--
--with a sheet of parchment paper.
And parchment is like wax paper, but it's more of a natural material.
And you just roll it out, trace your pan with a pen, and cut it out with scissors.
And this is really critical so that we can unmold the cake at the end.
So we're lining it with parchment around.
And so the first thing I'm going to do is put in a layer of the fruit
because that's what's going to be on top when we unmold it.
So we'll go ahead and add a layer of this fruit here.
I'm just going to spread that around with a spatula.
Nice layer there. Okay.
That looks good. A little bit more.
Press it down.
And then I'm going to go ahead and add half of my crust.
I'm just going to estimate and add half of this crust,
and that's going to be the middle cake layer.
Okay. So we'll add half of that.
And I'm just going to kind of distribute the crumbs a little bit before I press it down
because once you press it, it's hard to move it around.
Okay. And then I'm just going to press that down, and I'm kind of embedding
it into the fruit because that's what would happen if you baked this.
So we'll press that down; press that in pretty firmly.
Okay. Now we're going to go ahead and add the middle layer of fruit,
so go ahead and add the rest of this fruit here. Most of it.
That's good.
A little bit for decoration there saved.
Okay. So we'll push that down.
So the fruit is also really lightening this cake.
Sometimes raw cakes can just be very nutty--you know, a lot of nuts.
So we do have some nuts in here, but we're lightening it a little bit with all this fruit.
Okay. Then I'm going to go ahead and add the rest of the crust on top,
and this is going to be the bottom of the cake.
Okay. So we'll spread that around.
Get that kind of distributed first,
and then go ahead and press that down.
Okay. Now normally, I would chill this for 30 minutes before I mold it.
We're going to mold it now, and it'll be fine.
But because whenever you process things and then press them down,
you're warming them up a little bit, so you're making them a little bit softer.
So it'll unmold fine, but if you want to cut this into a really clean slice,
you'll want to chill this for 30 minutes first so that it cuts really cleanly,
otherwise it will crumble a little bit.
Okay. So assuming I have chilled this now for 30 minutes,
so now I'm going to just run a knife along the edges, just kind of loosen that up a little bit.
Okay. And now we can unmold it.
So you're just going to take a serving plate that's a little bit bigger than a cake pan, all right?
Wish me luck. Let's hope this works. [Jennifer laughs]
Okay. So we'll just turn this upside-down
and lift it up
and lift off the parchment.
And we've got a berry upside-down cake.
[Jennifer laughs] [audience applauds]
(Jennifer) Thank you. Okay.