Pineapple Upside Down Cake

Topping:

* 20 oz can of pineapple rings in juice (can substitute pineapple chunks)

* 1 c brown sugar

* ½ c (one stick) butter

Cake:

* 2 c all-purpose flour

* 3 tsp baking powder

* 1 tsp salt

* ½ tsp cinnamon

* 1 ¼ c sugar

* ½ c (one stick) butter

* 1 tsp vanilla

* 2 eggs

* 1 c juice drained from pineapple (top up with milk if not enough)

Heat oven to 350 Fahrenheit.

In a large oven-safe skillet, melt one stick of butter. Spread brown sugar evenly in the skillet, then arrange pineapple rings around the pan. You may not have room for all your pineapple.

In a medium-sized bowl, combine dry ingredients. In a large bowl, cream butter and sugar, add vanilla and eggs, and cream together well. Add the flour mixture to the butter mixture alternately with the pineapple juice. Pour the batter over the topping.

Bake at 350 for 35-45 minutes depending on the size of your skillet. A bigger skillet will cook slightly faster.

Allow to cool somewhat, then turn skillet upside down over a platter or cake plate. Decorate with colored sugar and/or maraschino cherries.

[pictures should go here but I’ve lost them all]

Back when I first started Real Life Cooking, I released three Patreon episodes. This is one of them. I closed the Patreon last year and don’t intend to reopen it, so I’m releasing those three episodes as extras. Enjoy!

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast Patreon bonus episode for April 2019! I’m Kate Shaw and we’re going to learn how to make pineapple upside down cake this month.

Most recipes for pineapple upside down cake call for a cake mix. I don’t see the point of that since cakes from scratch are so much better and just as easy. Besides, I don’t know what they’re putting in cake mixes these days, but it almost always upsets my stomach.

I got this recipe from a woman named Betty who I worked with back in my early 30s. Betty was an older country woman, practical and not given to flights of fancy, but bright and cheery too. She was nice to work with. One Monday morning she told me that she couldn’t sleep the night before so she’d turned on the TV and found a movie called Lord of the Rings, which she’d never heard of. She said she’d watched almost all of it but had fallen asleep before the end. She wanted to know if the hobbits had managed to destroy the ring, and I had to explain that it took them two more movies to do that. She also referred to Legolas yearningly as “that beautiful man.”

Anyway, I’d had Betty’s recipe for pineapple upside down cake for literally almost two decades but had never made it until last week. My family had an Easter get-together and my aunt Janice said we needed a cake and could I make one. I decided it was time for the pineapple upside down cake.

Pineapple upside down cake is unusual in that it’s made in a skillet. And it really is made upside down.

First, make sure your skillet is oven-safe. A cast-iron skillet is the best to use, but a steel skillet will work too as long as the handle is also fully steel. If your skillet has a plastic handle or a nonstick surface, don’t put it in the oven.

If you don’t have an oven-safe skillet, you can make this in a 9×13 cake pan, but it won’t be nearly as attractive. Don’t use a regular 9” round cake pan because it’s much too small.

The first thing you’ll do is unwrap a stick of butter and plop it into the skillet. Then turn the oven on to preheat to 350 degrees Fahrenheit and set the skillet in the oven. Keep an eye on it and as soon as the butter has mostly melted, remove the skillet from the oven. Be really careful doing this, especially if your skillet is heavy. The metal is hot and it’s easy to burn yourself. Let the oven continue to preheat while the skillet cools a little and the butter finishes melting.