Pear Upside-Down cake with caramel and orange zest

This cake just enchanted me! It has been a long time since I have eaten such a delicious, easy-to-make and at the same time very impressive dish!

Frankly speaking, on Sunday two of us ate the whole cake…

For sure I will be experimenting with this recipe using different fruit and spices ( apples, cinnamon, honey, nuts...). The cake is sweet so I had decrease the amount of sugar: I added 1 cup of sugar and we had to eat it with a cup of very bitter coffee (but still it was delicious!). It reminds me of Greek or Turkish pastries – wet because of the sweet syrup or in this case of caramel. And wonderful orange aroma blends ideally with pears!

Ingredients
1 cup sugar
1 cup water
3 pears
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla essence
½ cup brown sugar ( or ¾ cup if you prefer sweeter cakes)
lemon zest of 1 lemon
orange zest of 1 orange
50 g (2 oz) butter, melted

50 g (2 oz) vegetable oil
1 cup wheat flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
pinch of salt

Method
Pour the water to a saucepan, add sugar. Heat it slowly on low heat (about 20 min.), until you will get the golden caramel. Pour it into the baking pan lined with baking paper.

Place pieces of pears on caramel.
In a bowl beat eggs with sugar until fluffy, add lemon and orange zest, vanilla essence and butter (melted and cooled) with oil and salt, combine. Stir in sifted flour and baking powder. Spread the batter directly over pears. Bake for about 40 min. in preheated oven to 180 oC (360 F). As soon as the cake pan is cool enough to touch, place a plate over the cake and invert the cake onto the plate.