Plum and Blueberry Upside-Down Torte

I have loved these last two fruit desserts so much that going back to chocolate next week seems almost like a penance. Despite being called a torte, this cake is not fancy. It belongs to the wholesome club of buckles, crisps, and cobblers, except it's richer and prettier.
Rose recommends making this cake with greengage plums, which may be available in some parts of the country (Manhattan, for example), but Minnesota? Not so much. So I got regular plums.

And regular blueberries.

Instead of a brown sugar mixture on the bottom of the pan, as is typical with shortcake, there's a lovely caramel syrup.



The sugar first turns into a clear liquid,

then back to a thick, sugary mixture (this had me worried)

and finally into the caramel sauce that coats the bottom of the cake pan.

I rearranged the plums several times, cutting them into smaller pieces as I went along. The plums shrink during baking, so I could have squeezed more of them on the top.

I weighed the blueberries carefully--the 350 grams turned out to be one pint plus a handful. You could get away with using just one pint.

After the caramel sauce is made, and the fruit is cut and somewhat decoratively placed on top of the caramel, the cake itself is easy. (There's a reason this cake is on the Quick-and-Easy List).
Dry ingredients are mixed in a food processor. (The recipe calls for bleached all-purpose flour, which I didn't notice.) I can hardly see how it would have been any better if I'd used bleached flour, but I'll try it next time. Then mix in butter, eggs, and vanilla until it's a batter. Did I mention that this entire mixing episode is done in the food processor and takes about 10 seconds?

After about 40 minutes in the oven, it's brown and fragrant. It also has a few air bubbles on top, but I don't care since the top is going to be the bottom.

You must wait for a few anxious minutes until it's time to do the upside-down business. When I turned the pan over, I didn't hear the satisfying thunk that tells me that the cake has emerged more or less intact. But after a few more minutes, I heard a kind of whiffling noise that sounded like the cake was removing itself from the pan. I carefully lifted the pan, holding my breath, and discovered that all was well.

Jim and I each had a slice immediately--for scientific purposes only--so that we could compare the right-out-of-the-oven piece with the 24-hours-later piece. Jim thought it was just slightly better on the second day, and I thought it was just slightly better on the first day. Both of us thought the difference was so small that we wouldn't want to have to try to explain it.
Then I had to get rid of the rest of the cake. I cut what was left into two big hunks, put them on paper plates, wrapped them in plastic, and gave them to Jim, with instructions to give to the first neighbors he found home. He went next door and gave both plates to David and Tracey, who questioned whether he really intended to give them both plates. He explained that his job was to distribute to neighbors, but no one had told him how many neighbors, and it was too hot to wander around the neighborhood, cake in hand.
And that was the end of the blueberry-plum torte. I would like to make this again, maybe with peaches and raspberries. And if I ever spot greengage plums, I'm buying them up, because they too have an appointment with upside-down cake.