I’ll admit, there are very few photos of this particular dessert, but there is a reason for it. I wanted to take a few photos of it real quick right after I got it all prepared, but then I stepped away for a moment, since my husband and I were also working on making dinner.

Next thing you know, I turn around and my husband had opened one of our pantry cupboards and a rogue glass jar of spicy habenero honey from our last trip to Pike Place market in Seattle launched itself from the shelf, landing on the edge of the green plate on which this cake is sitting. Apparently the jar hit at such an angle to cause the entire plate to shatter, covering my pretty little cake in tiny little pieces of of ceramic death, peppered with little lime green paint chips.

Needless to say, only the few photos survived, and out of the 10 or so I took, only three were fit to print.

Don’t worry, I can attest to the cake’s deliciouneverbashfulwithbutter.comhttp://www.neverbashfulwithbutter.comsness, because as you see the recipe makes two cakes, and the other I’d been munching on all day, so it wasn’t really photo worthy, but it was definately tasteworthy.

The point of me even posting about this over here is to tell the story of my family’s version of Pineapple upside down cake.

We call it the Down upside cake. Why? Because when you’re down, you have to look for the upside, and thats pretty much what this cake was for my family.

As I’ve mentioned before, my family went through some pretty rough times when I was growing up. My dad had worked for a company called Alcoa, which was an aluminum fabrication plant. Apparently it has gone back in business, but when I was little, they closed down, putting a few hundred employees out of work. My mom was a stay at home mom, and so we had no income. Luckily my dad was able to get unemployment, and for a short time we made our meals from whatever my mom could afford to get with the foodstamps the state provided us with.

The thing about foodstamps in our area of the country in the early 80’s was that they were not accepted in many places. There were special stores that “poor people” went to, like the canned food warehouse. You can imagine what the quality of food was at a place that even states “can food” in the name. Canned pineapple was fairly inexpensive around here, mostly because it wasn’t very popular. The tropical fruit craze hadn’t yet hit us, and canned pineapple cost half what a can of peaches cost.

So very little of what we ate was fresh, and if it hadn’t been for my mom’s resourcefulness, we never would have had any fresh produce, but she managed to keep a cute little vegetable garden in the front yard, our neighbours had fruit trees which my sister and I pilfered from often, and every summer we spent plenty of time at my great grandfather’s strawberry orchard.

But there were times when the money was always gone, the fruit wasn’t quite ripe, and my mom had to come up with something to sweet to make for her family to sort of boost morale.  That was where this cake came in. Canned pineapple was cheap, and we made the “topping” out of brown sugar and margarine (I make it with butter now) because brown sugar was much less expensive than white sugar, and margarine could be bought in large quantities for really cheap.

Apparently my mom and dad first had pineapple upside down cake on a trip to california a few years before I was born. As their story goes, They fell in love with it, and my mom made it every week for a year because she couldn’t get her fill of it.. Of course, this practice died out by the time I was born, and it wasn’t until we were down and out that we started making it again. Probably because it tastes fresh, it doesn’t require frosting, and it puts a little smile on your face when you take a bite. All I know is my mom would buy these giant cans of sliced pineapple, and she didn’t use all of the juice for the recipe, so she’d let me drink it.

I LOVE pineapple juice. I will drink it till the cows come home and start wondering why I’m not drinking milk anymore. Seriously, pineapple juice is one of my favourite beverages. There’s just nothing like it.

You don’t have to add sugar to it like lemonade, but its just as refreshing. The pulp isn’t nearly as obnoxious as it is in orange juice. Its perfect.  The first time I encountered an actual pineapple and someone handed me a slice, I had no idea what to do with it, so I just sucked on it and got the juice out of it.

But I digress.

Our family was all about this pineapple filled cake. It wasn’t until later that we added the coconut.  We always used fresh coconut.

My mom would buy a whole coconut from the store and have my sister and I hammer HUGE nails through the coconut eye, and then drain all of the coconut juice. My mom would strain that and mix it with pineapple juice and we’d drink it. It just made sense that we’d grate the actual coconut meat and add it to the pineapple cake, since the two tasted so good together.

So to me, this cake always puts me in a good mood.

Oh, I forgot the other reason it made us kids happy. My mom would slice the cake in extra large slices so we could each have an entire pineapple slice on our piece. There’s nothing like an extra large slice of this sunny yellow cake to put a smile on someone’s face, no matter what else is going on in their world.

…Or maybe its just me. You know what they say, simple minds, simple pleasures.

So, onward with the recipe-

3/4 cup olive oil
1 1/2 cups sugar
2 cups all purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
3 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 (18oz) can sliced pineapple in its own juice
all of the pineapple juice from the can
1 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup brown sugar
1 cup toasted coconut

If you’d rather use fresh pineapple, then you’ll need 10-12 half inch slices of pineapple and at 3/4 cup pineapple juice in place of the canned pineapple and juice.

You don’t have to grill the pineapple ahead of time, but I find it makes for a much more “pineappley” flavour if you do. You can either grill the pineapple on the grill for a minute on each side, or use a grill pan, or even just a sauce pan. Be sure to brush both sides of the pineapple slices with either butter or olive oil so it wont stick to the pan!

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.You’ll need to prepare 2 9″ cake pans. Melt the 1/2 cup butter and pour half of it (1/4 cup) into the bottom of each cake pan. Sprinkle a half cup of brown sugar evenly over the melted butter in each pan. Take one tablespoon of the toasted coconut and sprinkle that over top the brown sugar in each pan Place half of the sliced pineapple in a decorative pattern over the brown sugar mixture in the bottom of each pan. Set aside.

In a large bowl, beat olive oil and sugar for about 5 minutes, until light and fluffy. Stir together flour, baking powder and salt. Set aside. Combine eggs, pineapple juice and vanilla extract. Add 1/3 of the flour mixture to the olive oil mixture then add half the pineapple juice mixture. Continue to alternate beginning and ending with flour mixture. Scrape the bowl and beater often. Fold in the remaining toasted coconut (minus the two tablespoons used with the brown sugar)

Pour the batter into prepared pans and smooth top with metal spatula. Bake cakes about 25 to 30 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the center emerges clean.

Allow the cakes to cool in the pans so the cake will absorb as much of the caramelized pineapple mixture as possible. At least half an hour, on the counter NOT in the fridge.

While the cake is cooling, You can make the extra pineapple caramel sauce.

This one is way easy-

1 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup butter
1 cup pineapple juice

1/4 cup heavy cream

Place the pineapple juice, brown sugar and butter in a large sauce pan and bring to a boil. Stir constantly and reduce the heat to medium low. continue stirring until the mixture has thickened to your liking. Remove from heat and add in the heavy cream. The mixture will fluff up quite a bit, so its important that you use a high sided sauce pan. Stir vigorously and set aside.

To serve the Down upside cake, loosen the sides of the cake from the pan with a knife. Place your cake plate or serving dish on the backside of the cake (the top) and invert the pan. Caramel sauce will coat the sides of the cake, and if you did it right, you’ll have a gloriously golden cake top. Finish with a dollop of whipped cream, and spoon over the pineapple caramel sauce. Sprinkle with some extra toasted coconut, and voila!

You’ll have two cakes, which honestly, makes 10 servings. In my family, this cake was an excuse to have an extra wide slice, because you didn’t want to cut through the beautifully golden pineapple slices. Its ok, because the cake itself is pretty thin, only about an inch and a half thick, so by no means are you eating more than a serving, PLUS you’ve got a nice big chunk of fruit!

Trust me. Its really good.

-A.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 1st, 2008 at 2:00 am and is filed under May 2007. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.