Hazelnut-Dried Fig Upside Down Cake

I grew up in Southern California, where Spanish monks first cultivated black Mission figs in America. I liked them well enough, but when Peter McGrath suggested a dried fig-hazelnut upside-down cake, I got excited. It evoked memories of Fig Newtons from my childhood, the delicious hazelnuts in Piedmont, Italy, and finally the all-American pineapple upside-down cake baked by Mita Antolini, a neighbor of my friend, Nancy Harmon Jenkins, the food writer, when I visited her in Tuscany. What a c