Upside-Down Cake is a cake that is assembled in the cake pan in an order opposite to that in which you’ll ultimately present it. This makes it a self-decorating cake.
You put fruit on the bottom of a cake pan. Fruit used includes cherry, cranberry, banana, apple, apricot, pear, rhubarb, plum, blueberry, peach pineapple, and papaya.
You then pour the batter over the fruit. The batter can be a sponge cake batter, or a butter-cake batter.
You bake the cake, then tip it out of the cake pan. In doing so, you invert it so that the fruit ends up on top.
History Notes
Upside-Down Cakes probably emerged sometime in the late 1800s in America. At first, it used to be made in cast-iron skillets on stove tops. At one time, it was called “skillet cake.” The handle of the frying pan helped make flipping easier.
Upside-Down Cakes started to become all the rage in America in the 1930s. They are now considered a retro kind of cake, and almost never seen commercially, only in homemade versions.