Another weekend, another cake to cross off my list! This week, the Heavenly Cake Bakers group is baking the individual pineapple upside down cakes. I love pineapple upside down cake, so I was looking forward to this one. I made it Saturday, and shared it with a few friends, then shared the leftovers with my parents, when they stopped in for a visit on Sunday. I also made a carrot cake, because my garden’s overflowing with Carrots, but I don’t have pictures of that one. It looked a little like this, only without the raisins.
I’ve apparently gotten even worse at remembering to take pictures while things are in progress, so I’ll have to do more talking than usual to make up for the pictures. 😉 You start out by making caramel, with water, turbinado sugar, and lime or pineapple juice. I chose lime, since I thought it would deliver an interesting tang, which it did. I took my caramel off the stove a few degrees early so that I didn’t feel the need to pour it into a glass measure, and I could just put it straight into the prepared pans. That worked well for me, I didn’t need to reheat it in order to keep it pourable while I worked.
After pouring the caramel in the ramekins, top it with a pineapple slice and a cherry. I couldn’t find any canned cherries that weren’t maraschino, so that’s what I used.
After the dishes are ready, start working on the batter. You’ve got butter, yogurt, egg/vanilla/yogurt mixture, and flour mixture. I’ve been on a greek yogurt kick as a substitute for sour cream lately, because it’s delicious. So, since that’s what I had around the house, that’s what I ended up using. It didn’t seem to cause any real moisture content issues in the finished cake.
This goes together like a standard Rose Levy Beranbaum sour cream butter cake (only with yogurt). Mix the liquid and butter into the flour mixture, then add the egg mixture in a couple of additions. Dish it out evenly into the pans, then try to smooth the tops.
Unmold as soon as they come out of the oven, onto the serving plates.
After that, make the pineapple caramel sauce. Honestly, I think this was the most tedious and time consuming part for me. My caramel took forever to reach the requisite 300 degrees the first time. Then when I added the remainder of the pineapple juice, it was already at 140 the first time I checked it. I decided that must be a typo, and tried to get it up to 240, and ended up just taking it off when it looked kinda sauce-ish to me. I neglected to get pictures after adding the sauce to each plate.
I think this is my new favourite way to do pineapple upside-down cake. Probably my new favourite pineapple upside-down cake recipe, too, though I wonder if making the caramel is necessary, or if I could do the more traditional butter/sugar mixture in the bottom of the pan thing, without having to cook it in a cast iron skillet. Regardless, this was definitely a hit. As I just discovered, the pineapple caramel sauce is delicious on mint chocolate chip ice cream, too. 😉
By the way, apologies for the late posting. I meant to post this last night, then got distracted by making plans for what to see and do while we’re in Jasper for our 5th Anniversary next month!
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