Apple and Vidalia Onion Upside Down Cake

Jeffrey Buben: Hi! I am Jeff Buben of Vidalia Restaurant and Bistro Bis. Today we're showing you some Vidalia Onion recipes. In this particular segment, we're going to do our famous Vidalia Onion and Apple Upside Down Cake. Before we get started, let me show you some of the ingredients that you're going to use today. We're going to use Granny Smith Apples which are a nice, tart, crisp apple, great for baking.

We're going to use our famous Vidalia onions. Now when you get a Vidalia onion what you want to look for is always ask for Jumbo Vidalia onions. You want a mature onion with light-green to yellow shoulders, no bruises and nice and mature. It should be just a little firm but not too firm and not too soft. We're going to use one cup of the onions. We're going to need two pans, one of the pans for caramelizing our onions, one of the pans for pre-baking our apples. We're going to take a piece of parchment paper, cut that in the circle to shape of our pan and have that ready. We're going to 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 little brown sugar, and a little butter and put the onions together in that and that's going to 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, two whole eggs, a quarter teaspoon of vanilla extract. We're going to blend that into a batter with three quarters cup all-purpose flour and one half cup of granulated sugar, one quarter teaspoon of double-acting baking powder. We're always going to sift our ingredients. Whenever you do baking and mix your dry ingredients, be sure to sift all ingredients beforehand. We're going to pour the batter over top and bake that in the oven. Let's get started.

The first step we're going to do is we're going to peel our apple and we're going to take three apples for this particular recipe. We just want to peel that apple nice and beautiful. What we want to do with that apple is we want to keep that apple in its natural shape and natural integrity. So we're just going to take a little bit of that apple off the bottom and just clean that off right up the top there. We're going to take an apple core and right in the center of the apple, we're going to clean out that core. That leaves a nice, beautiful shape of 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 going to take the onion, cut them in half, remove the core, the very bottom segment of the core. We're going to 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 cook everything evenly, so your final result will be a nice, beautiful even caramelization. So you want to end up measuring one cup, a nice full cup always works. We're going to take our pan and we're going to put the onions in the pan and we're going to coat those with two tablespoons of vegetable oil. I'm going to mix that up and that will go into the oven to caramelize.

When we finish our apple, we're going to cut the apple, takes about 8 slices to make even quarter-inch slices like that. We're going to do the same thing. We're going to brush our pan, with a little bit of vegetable oil and then we're just going to evenly place those right in the pan like this. What this is going to do is, this is going to help precook the apple a little bit, so therefore when it goes into the oven, it's going to give you a nice, even, soft finishing. You won't have any hard spots in your apple. So it's kind of a precooking process. That would go into the oven 350 degrees. The apple is going for about 6-8 minutes and the onions for about 8-10 minutes and when they come out, we'll show you what that looks like.

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 couple of tablespoons of vegetable oil. So let me show you how we'll prepare our pan. We're going to take a little bit of vegetable oil and we're going to coat the bottom of the pan and the sides with vegetable oil. Then we're going to take a piece of parchment paper or a wax paper will work just as fine. Cut a circle, of 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 going to put this in the bottom of the pan, put the pencil side down, of course. And that prepares our pan. This is going to help lift the onions and the apples out of the pan without having to worry about them sticking. Next, we're going to 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 four tablespoons of unsalted butter. We're just going to let that melt, very carefully. We're going to take a half cup of brown sugar and add that to the butter. We're just going to 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 that all that gluey goodness nice and gluey. We don't want to overheat it, we just want it soft just so it melts. That's just about perfect.

So we have our onions, they came out of the oven. They're nice and caramelized and we're going to add those to our brown sugar and butter mixture that has been liquefied and made into a caramel on the range. Just stir that in, and now we have an onion caramel. Mixing that together, we add that to the bottom, and make sure we get all those onions out. We just spread that in there, just spread it around. We're going to arrange the apples around the pan just like you would for an apple tart or a pineapple upside down cake and just arrange them around in a beautiful circle, round and round. We would 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 in our next segment, we're going to show you how to put together the batter. Then we're ready to bake.