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This upside-down cake, from Barefoot in Paris, was not a success, but I only partially blame the recipe. As some of you might know from The Food Network or her best-selling cookbooks, Ina Garten started a catering shop called Barefoot Contessa in the Hamptons 20 years ago. A few years back, she got her own television show and wrote several cookbooks. She mostly makes simple American food (and has only recently branched out to French) that tastes particularly good because of her emphasis on high-quality ingredients. She also has a strong reliance on terrifying amounts of butter and cream. Yes, some things taste better with extra fat, but it's not really the way I like to cook every day.

However, I did have a glut of Italian plums in my kitchen the other day and stumbled on this recipe to use them up. It's a riff on the classic tarte tatin, which is an upside-down apple tart that has become a ubiquitous dessert (and sadly, often ruined) in French bistros. Instead of sauteeing apple chunks with butter and sugar and then covering them with a short crust, Ina Garten drizzles fresh plums with caramel, then covers them with a sour cream-enriched batter, fragrant with lemon and vanilla.

First I halved the plums and laid them face down in a glass pie plate. Then I poured a simple caramel over them.

To make the caramel, I boiled sugar and water together, without stirring,

until the mixture turned a nice deep brown.

For the batter, I creamed together butter and sugar until light and fluffy, then beat in a few eggs, sour cream, a heaping pile of lemon zest and some vanilla. In another bowl, I sifted together some flour, salt and baking powder. SCREECHING HALT. I had no baking powder. WHAT? Impossible – my kitchen is usually so well-stocked with baking supplies that I've been known in the past to have not one but two containers of baking powder. And now, none? Before having a meltdown, I raced to the living room to pluck out Regan Daley's In The Sweet Kitchen from my bookshelf. I remembered that she had a substitution chart in her book for just these kind of kitchen emergencies. Sure enough, there was a chart for substituting baking powder.

I was supposed to use a combination of cream of tartar and baking soda. So, I carefully measured out and added them to the flour mixture, before combining the whole thing and pouring the batter over the plums.

I put the pan in the oven for close to an hour. When it emerged, the cake had risen slightly and browned. The smell of sour cream and lemon zest perfumed the room.

I let the cake cool on a rack for a while, then carefully turned the pan upside down and let the cake slide out onto a cardboard round. I cooled the cake to room temperature. When I cut in, though, it was clear something hadn't gone entirely right.

The cake had a strange rubbery consistency, and hadn't risen as I had expected it to. There were pockets of air here and there. The cake itself was blindingly sweet. The plums were only barely able to balance the sweetness out with their acidity. I blame the lack of proper baking powder on the cake's funny structure, but Ina Garten also needs to lay off the sugar. All in all, I wouldn't make this again. I will always prefer a real tarte tatin or a proper upside-down cake, perhaps from Ina's mentor?