It’s been months since I last conducted my baking experiment. With everything that’s happened in the past few months, I couldn’t muster the enthusiasm. Which is sad because baking is something I actually enjoyed. Imagine my surprise yesterday when I woke up raring to bake. I was even torn among three classics that I’ve never tried making before – pineapple upside-down cake, sans rival or mamon. I finally chose the first one. It was the first recipe that caught my attention yesterday morning, so I went with it.
There are so many recipes for pineapple upside-down cake, but I chose the one from the Goldilocks cookbook. Here’s how my first attempt looked like.
Acknowledgement: The full version of this recipe can be found here. In addition, I took the photographs from this post. If you think it’s nice enough to use, please let me know.
Here are the ingredients you’ll need.
Ingredients
- Sugar, 3/4 cup
- Water, 1/8 cup
- Cake flour, 1 3/4 cup
- Salt, 1/2 teaspoon
- Baking powder, 1 tablespoon
- Evaporated milk, 1/3 cup
- Cold water, 1/4 cup
- Unsalted butter, 3/4 cup (1 1/2 sticks)
- Sugar, 1 cup
- Eggs, 3
- Vanilla extract, 1 teaspoon
For some reason, the original recipe doesn’t mention pineapple slices and maraschino cherries, so I’m telling you that you’ll need them for this cake.
You start off by making caramelized sugar. Now I’m not really that patient with this process, but miracles have been known to happen. I placed the sugar in my pan and put it on medium heat. When the sugar started melting, I added water.
Pretty, right? Look at the lovely caramel color.
Then I spread the caramel on the pan. You can’t really see it from this picture, but trust me, it’s there. I used a 9″ pan instead of the prescribed 8″ x 8″ x 2″. I arranged the pineapples and cherries just so.
After that, I sifted the dry ingredients (cake flour, salt and baking powder) and set it aside. Then I creamed the butter and sugar. If you’re not sure how to cream butter and sugar, read this. I set my mixer at #4 for three minutes.
After creaming the butter and sugar, I added the eggs, vanilla extract, evaporated milk and water. I mixed it at the #4 setting for about two minutes.
I scraped the sides of the bowl, set the mixer on #2 and started adding the dry ingredients (cake flour, salt and baking powder) until it looked like this.
I poured the batter into the pan with pineapples and cherries and baked it at 350 F for 35 minutes.
Check out the outcome of this experiment!
Now we have after-dinner dessert this week!
Honestly, it looks like such a happy little cake. Maybe it’s because of the pineapples and cherries. The caramelized top worked really well with the fruits.
I can’t tell you if it’s the best recipe out there. After all, it’s my first time to make it. But the cake is sweet and all things nice, so I’m keeping the recipe in the meantime.