Learn how to Bake an Apple and Vidalia Onion Upside Down Cake
Hi, I’m Jeff Buben of Vidalia restaurant and Bistro biz. Today we’re showing some Vidalia onion recipes, in this particular segment we’re going to do our famous Vidalia onion and apple upside down cake. Before we got started, let me show some of the ingredients that you’re gonna use today. We’re gonna use granny smith apples, which are a nice tart crisp apples, great for baking. We’re gonna use our famous Vidalia onions. Now when you get a Vidalia onion, what you wanna look for is always ask for jumbo Vidalia onions, you wanna mature onion with light green to yellow shoulders, no bruises, and nice and mature, should be a little firm but not too firm, and not too soft. We’re going to use 1 cup of the onions, we’re going to need 2 pans, one of the pans for caramelizing our onions, one of the pans for prebaking our apples. We’re going to take a piece of parchment paper, cut that into circle to shape of our pan, and have that ready. We’ll gonna need some oil for that pan and also for caramelizing the onions. When the onions and the apples come out of the oven, we’re going to take and caramelize those with a little brown sugar and a little butter and put the onions together in that, and that’s gonna be the bottom of our pan. The next step of our process is going to be the batter, the batter consists of 5 ounces of milk, 2 whole eggs, a quarter teaspoon of vanilla extract. We’re going to blend that into a batter with 3 quarters cup all purpose flour, ½ cup of granulated sugar, one quarter teaspoon of double acting baking powder, we’re always going to sift our ingredients, whenever you do baking that mix your dry ingredients, be sure to sift those ingredients beforehand. We’re gonna pour the batter over top and bake that in the oven. Let’s get started. Okay, the first step we’re going to do is we’re going to peel our apple, and we’re going to take 3 apples for this particular recipe. We just want to peel that apple nice and beautiful and what we want to do with that apple is we want to keep that apples natural shape and natural integrity, so we’re just gonna take a little bit of that apple off the bottom and just clean that off right off the top there. We’re gonna take an apple core and right in the center of the apple, we gonna clean up that core. And that leaves a nice beautiful shape for the apple. And that’s going to give us a nice round even look on the top of the cake when it’s done, so it makes a beautiful presentation, it also helps to keep and bake the cake evenly. Then we’re going to take our onion after we peel the onion, we’re gonna take the onion, cut them in half, remove the core the bottom, the very bottom segment of the core, we’re gonna cut the onion into one inch strips for caramelizing. Just simply like that. The idea of keeping everything even is it helps cooking process and it helps cooks everything evenly, so, your final result will be a nice beautiful even caramelization. So you wanna end up measuring one cup, a nice full cup always works. We’re gonna take our pan, and we’re gonna put the onions in the pan, and we’re gonna coat those with, 2 tablespoons of vegetable oil. We’re gonna mix that up, and that will go into the oven to caramelize. When we finish our apple, we’re gonna cut the apple, takes about 8 slices to make even quarter inch slices like that. We’re gonna do the same thing, we’re gonna brush our pan with a little bit of vegetable oil, and then we’re just gonna evenly place those right in the pan like this. And what this is going to do is, this is gonna help pre cook the apple a little bit, so therefore when it goes into the oven it’s going to give you a nice even soft finish and you won’t have any hard spots in your apple. So it’s kind of a precooking process. And those go into the oven, 350 degrees, the apples going for about 6 to 8 minutes. And the onions for about 8 to 10 minutes, and when they come out, we’ll show what that looks like. Okay, we’ve baked the onions and here’s what they look like when they come out of the oven. They have a nice caramelization, almost a little like toasted coconut, we don’t want them too oily. Here are the apples, the apples have been in the oven, we coated those with a couple of tablespoons of vegetable oil, so let me show you how we’ll prepare our pan. We’re gonna take a little bit of vegetable oil and we’re gonna coat the bottom of the pan and the sides with vegetable oil, then we’re gonna take a piece of parchment paper or, or wax paper will work just fine, cut a circle the size of the pan, mark it with a pencil, cut that, you can always fold this in half to make a nice beautiful circle. We’re gonna put this in the bottom of the pan, put the pencil side down, of course, and that prepares our pan. This is gonna help lift the onions and the apples out of the pan without having to worry about them sticking. Next, we’ll gonna move over to the range and show you how to make the caramel. Over a medium heat, take a 10 inch skillet, we’re going to add 4 tablespoons of unsalted butter, we’re just gonna let that melt, very carefully, we’re gonna take a half cup of brown sugar and add that to the butter. We’ll just gonna mix that until it melts and liquefies. This is going to be the bottom for our upside down cake and this is where you get all that gooey goodness, nice and gooey, we don’t wanna overheat it, we just wanna soft, just ‘til it melts, that’s just about perfect. So we have our onions that came out of the oven, very nice and caramelize and we’re gonna add those to our brown sugar and butter mixture, that has been liquefied and made into a caramel on the range. Okay. And just stir that in, and now we have an onion caramel. I’m mixing that together we add that to the bottom, make sure to get all those onions out, we just spread that in there, just spread it around, we’re gonna arrange the apples around the pan, just like you would for an apple tart or a pineapple upside down cake. Just arrange them around in a beautiful circle, around and round, well we work our way all the way to the middle, and there you have the bottom of your apple and onion upside down cake. Coming up on our next segment, we’re gonna show you how to put together the batter. Then we’re ready to bake.