Gluten Free Upside Down Birthday Cake

Today is my beloved wife/best friend's birthday.  With that in mind, I decided to make her a simple 'tug boat-style' upsidedown cake.  The only problem is, Peg is a 'celiac', so I got her to make the cake and I made the topping (or since it's upside down, the 'bottoming' :-)  
 My way is: since ya gotta heat up your oven to 350 anyways, while it's heating let it heat a stick of butter, that ya gotta melt anyhow.

Once the butter is melted, pour in a quart of canned loquat plums.  If you do not have canned plums I feel sorry for you, but you can use any canned fruit of your choosing .  On top of the fruit, crumble a cup of light brown sugar.  We highly recommend Domino brand sugar.  It is pure cane sugar, it's grown in our neighborhood and made down the River from here.

It is important to note, that the amount of sugar you use is dependent on how sweet your fruit is, as well as how sweet you want your topping to be. Our canned plums are not sweet at all, canned in natural fruit juice with very little sugar.  The heaping cup full of light brown sugar (that I did not measure) was all we wanted; it gave the fruit a hint of sweet and retained the tartness of the plums.  The plum flavor is delicate, so with too much sugar you couldn't tell what kind of fruit they were.

While I was doing this, Peggy made a gluten-free lemon sheet cake and which we poured over the fruit.

Hi! Peggy here with the cake batter recipe. At the good advice of one of the people in the Celiac Disease Support Group on Face Book, I'm letting yall know that this recipe (which I've 'tortured' almost unrecognizable to suit my own tastes)...comes from Bette Hagman's cookbook, entitled, "The Gluten Free Gourmet", page 92. Lemon Sheet Cake. I don't know how the cake is really supposed to taste because I've substituted so many of the "degredients", as Cappy jokingly calls them. Anyhow, here's how I made it:(...and it is GOOOOOD! )

 

After 40 minutes in the 350F oven, and 'toothpick' tested, the cake came out, and for those of you who have trouble with  your upside down cakes sticking to the pan, if you follow my method, when you remove the cake from the oven and give it a little shake you will see the cake moves in the pan floating on the topping.  You let it rest for 30 minutes or so cooling in the pan.  

That way the topping has time to set and for the excess juices to be absorbed up into the cake.  That way when you cut and remove a piece, the topping doesn't run back into the pan.

Like everything we do, it turned out to be a group project and wound up very good.  The lemon cake complimented the sweet, tart topping and with a dollop of Cool Whip on top it "done us proud"

It turned out to be an amazing Birthday cake and rightly so because it was for an amazing sweetie-pie on her Birthday.