July 4th Recipes

This stunning upside-down cake is the perfect, easy dessert to showcase your bounty of summer fruit. The cake is tender and moist, with just enough of a delightful toothy texture from the incorporation of cornmeal into the batter. You’ll want to use juicy, ripe blueberries and peaches for best results; however, you could use frozen fruit in a pinch—just be sure to thaw and dry throughly. A few more tips to ensure upside-down cake success: Finish incorporating the ingredients by hand, this will prevent over-mixing your way to a tough cake. Also, aim to arrange the fruit as tightly as you can in the cake pan; fruit shrinks as it cooks and you don’t want too much unadorned cake poking through. Finally, if you want to skip the cornmeal, simply swap it 1:1 with all-purpose flour (for a total of 1 1/3 cups). 

Traditional? No. Delicious? Oh, yes. This quick-fix take hits all the highlights of a classic berry crisp--syrupy-sweet fruit, crisp topping, and cool cream--in a fraction of the time.

This show-stopper is easy to assemble, but so impressive. The only component of this effortlessly elegant tart that needs to bake is the puff pastry base itself. Once it’s baked and cooled, you’ll top it with a creamy, fluffy spread of sweetened mascarpone cheese mixed with marzipan (i.e. almond paste), vanilla, freshly whipped cream. You’ll want to wait until right before serving time to assemble your dessert. All of those glorious summer fruit juices are going to start seeping into your puff pastry and will lead to sogginess if prepared too far in advance. 

Using a blend of Bing and Rainier cherries, this easy upside-down cake is a real looker, sure to impress any group you share with. If you can’t find Rainier cherries, you can certainly use all sweet or a mix of whatever varieties of sweet and tart cherries you can find locally. Fresh thyme leaves delicately scent the cake with a herbaceous aroma, which makes a wonderful complement to the sweetness of the caramelized fruit topping. For a perfectly tender and moist cake, finish incorporating the ingredients by hand, as this will prevent over-mixing your way to a tough texture. You’ll also want to be sure to arrange the cherries as tightly as you can in the cake pan; fruit shrinks slightly as it cooks and you don’t want too much unadorned cake poking through.