Pineapple and cake and cream!

No, I haven't gone nuts over chiffon cakes.. Just that this cute li'l chap

had been lying around the kitchen and I had this funny desire to devour him with some cake and cream, and then I had two reasons, the first one being my kid sis, Aaliya, winning the inter school debate 'Materialism is degrading social values,' and her picture along with her partner's and the judges' appeared in a popular newspapers' student edition and she was rather sad that she looked fat but happy that her watch looked cool. Yes, she spoke for the motion! Well the second reason was that at that time I had only one more exam to go, and that was a really good reason. Oh, there was a third one as well, just came to my mind, and this one was the driving force, that my mother said it wouldn't be good for the poor pineapple if it was made to stand there another day, and as I just said, I had a craving, so I had to act.

As you can see the cream is all runny. I used my 25% cream again, but it appears I was only first time lucky, because I have used it thrice now, and for the past two times, no matter what, it just won't get stiff when I beat it. It does gain alot of volume but that's it. But it turns out I wasn't that unlucky, because I discovered that this runny thing goes very well cakes anyway, you can make the cake soak up some, so that it gets nice and moist, and isn't dry, and you can also then cover it with it, that is its not that runny, which is what I did. The was the same as my first time lucky one, just that this time no ganache, the layers had cream and pineapple between them, I used up the whole for this three layered one.

And another thing, I really don't why, but the cake had a definite sour taste to it. It wasn't pronounced enough to make the cake taste bad, but definitely there. I don't know if it was the cream, or the pineapple juice (which I got from boiling the remains with some water) I made the cake soak, you see I wanted a through and through pineapple cake! But the strange thing about the sour taste was that it got weaker with time. So that the last slice I and Aaliya shared on the third day of making the cake didn't have that sour taste at all!

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Upside down cakes

Thanks for inviting me to contribute! Well here is my first post, very quick since my 3-year-old is crying for attention, two cakes I made recently, using up the fresh blackberries, cherries and pineapple I picked up at my local fruit market.

I got the recipes from trolling the web, for the pineapple upside down cake I chose this one, not because it seemed easy and didn't call for a skillet, but because I liked the idea of using ground cardamom -- the spice of choice for Indian desserts-- in this recipe, I went ahead and added about 1.5 tsp of cardamom powder, and I used cherries to add some color. I actually baked two, to use up the whole pineapple and took one to work, where it reminded nearly everyone of their mother's cakes!

The blackberry cake was from this recipe. Frankly, I was underwhelmed by it, and my 3-year-old found it too icky -- but then she finds most food so. Of course my husband was happy to polish it off!

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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.

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