Tuesday 10 July 2007

pineapple upside down



A google search for madeira cake threw up alot of results like this, this, this and this (all of them more or less alike). Not surprising though, since Madeira is perhaps the oldest and best loved of cakes. My mother says it a base cake for many cakes, i.e. that you can bake them just by altering the madeira recipe a bit.

Our Madeira recipe comes from the McDougalls Better Baking cookbook. Ammi got a quite a few copies of this by collecting a certain number of McDougalls' product wrappers! All but one of which she distributed among my aunts, and that one one is our copy. Its really a pretty good book with all the sorts of recipes and simple, easy to follow instructions.


Here's the Madeira recipe

Madeira Cake
100 g butter or margarine
125 g caster sugar
200 g self-raising flour
pinch of salt
2 eggs
30 ml milk
a few drops of vanilla essence OR a little grated lemon rind
thin strip of citron peel (optional)

Grease and line a 15 cm round cake tin.
Prepare by creaming or one stage method.
Place the mixture into the tin, smooth level and lay the strip of citron peel on top.
Bake at 180C till golden brown and a toothpick inserted in the middle of the cake comes out clean.

For this pineapple upisde down I (as must be obvious to you by now) used the plain ol' madeira recipe and just added some drained pineapple and cherries to it. Since this recipe of pineapple cake calls for buttermilk, I used buttermilk and milk in equal proportions, 2tbsp milk and 2tbsp buttermilk, instead of all four tbsp milk as in madiera (I doubled the quanity, it was a good 400gm cake). Though I used fresh butter and didn't use baking soda, adding the pineapple and the cherries at the last stage, after tossing them in some flour.

I used around 450gms of pineapple, and around 350gm of cherries, would have preffered fresh ones, but had to make to with canned. After setting aside a few of the slices for the upside down thing, I cut the remaining slices into slivers and let them drain. The cherries were seeded and halved. Then I proceeded to make the batter.

Then, greasing a bundt pan, layed down the pineapple slices before pouring the batter over them and baked at 180C. Will avoid mentioning for how long since I feel it keeps changing.

The cake turned out moist and rich Though I feel I over baked it a bit, and hence the slightly darker tone. You can always vary the amount of fruit you want to put in your cake depending upon how rich you like it.




1 comment:

Anonymous said...

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