Gluten Free Universal Batter for Cakes, Slices and Muffins : Plum Upside Down Muffins

These plum muffins were made using the universal batter recipe with Well and Good self raising flour and SPC pure apple puree, published earlier. They look more like an individual upside down plum cakes. These muffins are easy to bake, they taste absolutely delicious and look very pretty.

With plums in season, and variety in their colours, flavours and sizes, I wanted to try something not very typical in baking muffins. Slices of large dark plums had a perfect size to use in a muffin tray to bake an upside down individual cakes. This flexible batter, as I have witnessed again and again, takes any fruit and texture, either on top of the bake, or baked in the bottom for upside down cakes. It is an easy task to prevent his batter, though quite runny, leaking into fruit layer either in full size cakes or mini cakes. I was not able to provide step by step photos in the first publication of this recipe. I made sure we took photos this time.

Ingredients:

Universal gluten, dairy  and oil free apple batter

for a tray or 12 muffins (I used 2-3 plum slices for each individual cake and was left with some batter left, which I used for mini-loaf upside down cake)

• 3 large eggs
• 1 tub, 140g SPC pure apple puree
• 150g sugar (I always use 140g granulated sugar and 10g vanilla sugar)
• 180g gluten free Self Raising Flour by Well and Good (quantities for self raising flour by different brands can be slightly different, because whole grain and starches ratios and mix vary)

Extra ingredients for plum individual cakes

• 6 large plums, sliced
• unsalted butter (or non-dairy equivalent) to grease muffin baking tray, and for the sauce in the bottom of every muffin hole
• extra granulated sugar to dust the sides of muffin holes, and to use for the sauce in the bottom of every muffin hole

Preparation:

muffin tray preparation

• generously grease holes in a baking tray for 12 muffins
• cut cirles of baking paper to fit the bottom of each muffin hole
• place baking paper circles in the bottom of each hole, make sure they stick to bottoms and stay in place
• apply sugar to the sides of each muffin hole, shake the excess of sugar off
• place small piece of unsalted butter in each muffin hole
• sprinkle sugar on top of butter
• place 2-3 plum slices (depending on their thickness)  in every muffin hole

batter preparation

• place eggs, apple puree and sugar in a bowl of benchtop mixer (it can be done by hand held mixer, too), beat on high for 10 min, until the mixture becomes pale and triples is volume

• fold self raising flour into beaten eggs, sugar and apple puree, the batter will lose volume even with careful folding, do not worry about that, just make sure that the flour is well combined within the mixture

• spoon the batter over plum slices
• flatten the surface of batter by gently tapping the tray on the benchtop
• bake in preheated to 165-170C fan forced oven, for 30-35 min (in my oven), or until the surface of the bake is golden brown and firm to touch
• cover baking tray with a sheet of baking paper
• put a wire rack on top of baking paper
• turn the cake over to wire rack
• gently tap each muffin hole bottom and take the pan off
• carefully peel baking paper circle from the top

In my bake half of baking paper circles stayed inside muffin holes, but all muffins came out fine. Each cake or muffin looked different, and some had caramel juices penetrating the crust. But there was no leakage of the sauce into the baked batter. Cakes had their wonderful soft and moist texture inside with melting plum flesh, tart and juicy.

It obviously takes extra time and effort to prepare muffin tray for individual upside down cakes. You can simply place plum slice(s) with a bit of sugar on top, and bake  regular muffins with fruits. I baked apple and cinnamon muffins from the same batter, using grated apples with sugar and cinnamon, inserted in the middle of each muffin.

With apple muffins, I used all batter to fill 12 muffin holes and as the result they were larger in size, compared to plum ones. They also had this wonderful sugary crust on the sides and in the bottom. It gave muffins an extra contrast in textures from the crust and the insides.

Plums can be chopped and mixed with batter and baked as regular fruit muffins. I never did it, but can suspect that it will be a nice bake, too.

All I can say, that we had to restrain ourselves during the long photography session to test new lighting regimes. Finally, when it was all over, we truly enjoyed these cakes. Last week I bought another 2 bags of Well and Good gluten free self raising flour, and with at least 5 bakes of this recipe out of one bag, I am afraid plum indulgence is going to continue.