Pineapple upside-down cake (Happy Birthday, Ben!)

In honor of Ben's birthday, today I baked mini pineapple upside-down cakes from a recipe I found at Salon.com. (See the recipe here.)

1 stick butter, softened

1 cup white sugar

2 egg yolks

Mix together until fluffy. Hang on to the egg whites. They'll get mixed in at the end. I'm just following instructions here. I have no idea why you need to mix in the yolk and the white separately. Maybe someone (Mom?) will enlighten me in the comments.

2 cups all-purpose flour

2 teaspoons baking powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

Sift dry ingredients. Add to wet ingredients, alternating with:

1/2 cup whole milk (I had skim milk, so I added a little half-and-half to compensate) 

Beat together:

2 egg whites

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

And add to batter. My batter was very thick by this time and unlike any cake batter I've seen before. I was beginning to worry...

To make the sauce, melt together in a skillet on the stove:

2 Tablespoons butter

1 cup packed brown sugar

Pour sauce into muffin cups. Add a slice of pineapple to each (Canned pineapple is too wide to fit in muffin tins. I just cut out a wedge of the circle and pushed the ends together to make a smaller circle. Save the trimmed bits to use in the 11th and 12th muffin cup, unfortunately for this recipe there are only 10 slices per can of pineapple.) 

Next scoop an equal portion of cake batter over each pineapple slice. The original recipe says to fill to 3/4 full. How they can manage this when just adding pineapple fills the cups to over 1/2 full, I still don't know. Even after adding more cake batter per cup than recommended, I found that I had at least a whole other mini-cake's worth left over. This might not be a recipe to re-use.

Bake at 350 for 25 minutes. And, unless you want to find yourself cleaning carbonized goo off the bottom of the oven an hour later, I'd recommend putting a pan under your muffin tin to catch bubbling brown sugar.

 

Not too pretty, but pretty tasty. I've done assorted garnishes, maraschino cherries and coconut. 


We served our cakes accompanied by fudge brownie ice cream--a delicious, if unorthodox, pairing. We all agreed that the cakes tasted good, but I'm not really satisfied with the end product. Perhaps if they weren't trying to pass themselves off as cakes, I would have liked these little guys better. The cake part was so dense that it was more like pound cake or a scone than traditional yellow cake. Maybe the density of the cake is necessary for the mini cakes to stay together once flipped? Whatever the reason, I won't be trying this recipe again soon... at least not until next birthday.