This cake is one of the team’s all-time favourite cakes and one I make for team meetings every February when plums and apricots are in abundance. This year is the first year we have had the cake without the Satsuma plums supplied from one of our colleagues; unfortunately he chose another career last year. Any blood plums make a wonderful cake. If you want to make the cake outside of the plum season, tinned plums work well.

The recipe is taken from the Apricot Upside-Down cake in Bills Food by Bill Granger

Ingredients for cake

• 100 g unsalted butter
• 1 cup castor sugar
• 4 eggs at room temperature, separated
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 1 1/4 cups plain flour, sifted
• 2 tsp baking powder

Ingredients for topping

• 100 g unsalted butter
• 1 lemon, juice and zest
• 1 cup castor sugar
• 1 tsp vanilla essence
• 12 plums halved and stoned

For the cake

1. Preheat oven to 180°C (less for a fan forced oven).
2. Place butter and sugar in a bowl and cream until light and fluffy.
3. Add egg yolks one at a time, beating well after each addition; add vanilla.
4. Gently fold in the sifted flour and baking powder.
5. In a clean dry bowl, beat egg whites until stiff. Fold through cake mixture with a large metal spoon.

For the topping

1. Place butter, sugar, vanilla essence and lemon juice and zest in a non-stick fry pan over medium heat and melt.
2. Cook gently for 2 minutes, stirring occasionally; increase heat and boil remaining liquid in the pan for 5 minutes until a rich caramel forms.
3. Remove from heat and arrange plums face down in the pan. They need to quite tightly packed into the pan.
4. Spoon cake mixture evenly over the plums and smooth with a spatula.
5. Bake cake for 45 minutes or until a skewer inserted into the centre of the cake comes out clean.
6. Remove cake from oven and leave in pan for 5 minutes.
7. Cover pan with a plate and turn cake over onto plate.
8. Serve with cream or vanilla bean yoghurt.

Tips

• I used large sized eggs
• It is best to make the cake mixture first so it is ready to add to the topping once it is finished.
• I use a deep 26 cm non-stick frypan that can be put in the oven.
• Once the cake is cooked, take the pan from the oven and let stand for 5-7 minutes. The time is quite critical as if you upend the cake onto a plate too quickly the topping is still runny and slips off the top of the cake and if you take too long to upend the cake onto a plate, the toffee topping sets and sticks to the pan leaving some of the top of your cake in the pan.