HCB: Plum and Blueberry Upside-down Torte

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Tom is in high heaven right now… for the past 2 weeks I have prepare sweets that are dear to his taste buds. Lemon cake, Apricot-Almond Berry Buckle and now this upside-down Torte.

I almost did not make this cake.  For some unknown reason I keep thinking that the Chocolate Feather Bed was the next cake and that this one was due the following week.

I think I was just blocking it out from my head, because we had had way to much fruit in my baking of late and I was pretty over it.

So when I read Marie’s Last Cake, Next cake recap and realized my mistake, I was all “oh man, another fruit cake - crap!”.

I was not looking forward to this one, but it was on the list and it had blueberries in it and Tom goes ga-ga over blueberries, so someone was going to be happily eating cake this weekend.

I did not even half the recipe - I figure lets overload him on fruit and he will eventually shout “ENOUGH!”. At least that was my strategy and I was sticking to it.

I started by making the decision to use my cast iron pan, I did not want to do the “do it here and then pour it there” dance.

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ABC: Apricot-Almond-Berry Buckle

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Remember a couple of weeks ago when I sang the praises of the yumylisious Lemon-Scented Pull-Apart Coffee cake?

The one that I have baked 4 6 times and made me embrace my inner conflicted relationship with yeast and rolling pins.

Well, I was so impress that I ran out and bough Flo Braker book "Baking for All Occasions.  Because I knew that if she could pull that off with a coffee cake, what else can she pull off?

Afterwards, I got a shout out from a fellow HCB baker, Hannaa from Hanaa’s Kitchen who along with her friend Wafae launched a monthly baking project called the ABC of the Month, which stand for “Avid Baker’s Challenge of the month”.  The concept is to choose a book and to bake from it and post the results on the first Tuesday of each month.  Guess which book they choose to with in 2010?

uh, yeah...I joined them faster than you can type – “I’m in!”

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HCB: Lemon Meringue Cake

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“With this cake I thee wed.”

 Apparently all I needed to do for Tom to propose to me was to make this cake. 

This week’s Heavenly Cake Baker choice was the Lemon Meringue Cake.  Think lemon Meringue pie in form of a cake and you pretty much will have the idea of how this cake will end up tasting. My hat off to Rose for turning a popular pie to an AMA-Zing cake.

After a couple of weeks of chocolate overdrive, we were all waiting for this cake.  But, nobody was waiting for this cake more than Tom was.  Since he tasted the Baby Lemon Cheesecake, he is now on “red” alert every time something has the code world “lemon” in it.  So, when he saw my baking calendar (yes I do have one posted) and read what choice cake we had this week, he started the lemon cake shakedown:

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