Cherry Upside Down Cake

I love Cherry season, and while usually the cherries don't make their way into anything but my mouth, I decided to take extra care to make an actual recipe with some this year. What better than an upside down cake? This is super yummy, and could easily be made in muffin form if slicing cake and slightly messy cleanup isn't your thing.

To make this yummy cake you will need:

1-1½ cups of Bing Cherries, pitted
½ cup brown sugar, packed
2 Tablespoons cold butter, cut into pieces
½ teaspoon lemon or lime juice

1½ cup All-purpose Flour
¾ cups Sugar
½ teaspoons Salt
2 teaspoons Baking Powder
⅓ cups Vegetable Oil
1 whole Egg
⅓ cups Milk
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 teaspoon Cinnamon

Preheat your oven to 400 degrees. Grease a 8"x8" cake pan (a 9" circle would also work great, or you can line muffin tins and make muffins!) I always use softened butter, spray would be fine I'm sure.

I start by pitting my cherries and adding in some lime juice (I don't use any fancy cherry pitter, I savagely take out the pits by hand and look like quite a barbarian by the time I'm finished). Stir this together and set aside.

After your pan has been greased, evenly spread your 1/2 cup of brown sugar over the bottom. Spread on your layer of cherries, then dot with 2 Tablespoons of butter.
Next, make your batter. Combine flour, sugar, salt, cinnamon and baking powder. Place vegetable oil into a 2 cup measuring cup; add the egg, milk and vanilla. Mix this together and add to the flour mixture. *This makes a very thick batter that bakes up surprisingly light, you've been warned.

Pour the cake batter over your cherries and spread evenly. Bake for 20-25 minutes in a 400 degree oven, then remove to a cooling rack to cool. When ready to remove, slide a knife around the edges of your pan and invert onto a plate. Enjoy all the yummy cherries and sugar seeping into that cakey goodness. MMM.

Busy Busy Busy

I apologize for the lack of posts lately, I had about the busiest week ever at both of my jobs and it has left pretty much no time for anything but work (not to mention I'm been incredibly stressed out). The above instagram photo is a little peek into an ingredient that has been quite abundant here in the Pacific NW as of late, and I will be sharing a recipe or two this week featuring cherries, this tasty red fruit.

In fact, I have a few recipes almost ready to post, including a tasty Pina Colada popsicle/granita recipe my husband created this past week. Hold onto your Summer food crafting hats!

In the meantime, if you find yourself missing my more frequent posts and ideas, feel free to follow me on Pinterest or Facebook, where even on my busiest days I seem to find time to add a tidbit for you all to enjoy.

Paper Gerbera Daisies

My favorite flower is probably a gerbera daisy. I love the bright colors they come in, they seem to last quite a long time in a vase compared to other varieties, and something about them is just plain fun. I have been working on a pattern to make some out of paper for quite awhile, and came close to finishing it up for a Craft Wars challenge, but decided to hold off and work on it a tiny bit more to make sure it was just right. Here are my results, let me know what you think!

To make your own paper daisies you will need:

Paper of choice (I used a magazine)
Scissors
Daisy Petal Template
wire stem
glue
Decorative button
floral tape (optional)




I started by making a template for my petals. Since cutting these out gets rather time consuming (or maybe it's just the fact I always cut these out while doing something else like watching a movie?) I opted to go with only 3 different sizes of petals, cutting 2 of each size to make one flower. You could certainly play with the size on your computer/printer to get more like 5 or 6 different sizes of petal templates and use smaller petals in place of a button center, as I used.



I've never seen a flat daisy, so I used my scissors to gently curl each petal a little before gluing my edge tab under. As this daisy is made with magazine paper, not much pressure is needed, and you want to be careful not to tear your petals, as they did just take you awhile to cut out. I will mention, these work pretty great with vellum papers -- I'll get photos of the one I attempted and post it later on, but the fact that these only make a slight cone shape in the center once assembled makes them work well with thicker papers as well as thin.





I found these great flower shaped buttons and decided they'd look great with my flowers. You could use just about any button you like, or if you don't like the button look, attach your button to your floral wire stem, then cover it with a little batting and wrap it in your favorite fabric or some tissue paper.



Then start adding your petals on (you will need to poke a small hole in the center of each one before putting it on the wire), arrange them as you like (you may need to add a little glue between each layer of petals to help them stay in place) and wrap the stem in floral tape if you want. I always wrap mine with tape as I think it look nicer, but it is not necessary.

If you want to check out more handmade crafts and recipes, visit this link party at Frugal By Choice, Cheap By Necessity.