Vintage Recipes: Baking a Pineapple Upside-down Cake 

Hello lovelies, I recently bought a cookbook featuring vintage recipes from the 1950s and 1960s. I wanted to try baking one of the recipes from the dessert section, so I went with the Pineapple Upside-down Cake. 

History:  According to most historians, the late 1800s were when the term “upside-down cake” first began appearing. Up until that time, this type of cake was referred to as skillet cakes. This was because ovens have not always been standard or reliable; skillet cakes were born of practicality. Cakes were made in the popular cast-iron skillets on top of the stove. Inverting a cake to reveal a topping was very popular as far back as the Middle Ages. The first upside-down cakes were not even made with pineapple, but with seasonal fruits such as apples and cherries, as the canned pineapple had not been invented yet. Canned pineapple manufacturing didn’t begin until 1901, when Jim Dole established the Hawaiian Pineapple Company (now Dole Company) and began producing and marketing mass quantities of canned pineapple.

In 1925, the Hawaiian Pineapple Company sponsored a contest calling for pineapple recipes with judges from the Fannie Farmer’s School, Good Housekeeping, and McCall’s Magazine on the judging panel. It is said that 2,500 of the 60,000 submissions were recipes for upside-down pineapple cake. The company decided to run an ad about the flood of pineapple upside-down cake recipes it had received, and the cake’s popularity increased!

Book: Retro Recipes from the ’50s and ’60s by Addie Gundry 

Recipe:

6 Tablespoons Unsalted Butter

3/4 cup packed light brown sugar

7-8 slices canned pineapple 

14 maraschino cherries 

1 cup all-purpose flour 

1/4 cup granulated sugar 

2 teaspoons baking powder 

1/2 teaspoon ground cardamom 

pinch of kosher salt 

1 large egg

1/2 cup buttermilk 

1/3 cup sour cream 

3 tablespoons vegetable oil 

1 teaspoon vanilla extract 

1 teaspoon rum extract 

Direcetions:

1. Preheat the oven to 350 F
2. In a small bowl, melt the butter in the microwave.
3. Pour the melted butter evenly into a 9-inch springform cake pan and set it on top of a baking sheet. 
4. Sprinkle the brown sugar over the melted butter.
5. Add 5 whole slices of pineapple in the pan.
6. Halve the 3 pineapple slices and place them between the whole slices.
7. Place one cherry in the center cut-outs of both the whole and halved slices and in the outside gaps. 
8. In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, granulated sugar, baking powder, m, and salt.
9. In a 2-cup liquid measuring cup, Whisk together the egg, buttermilk, sour cream, vegetable oil, vanilla and rum extract.
10. Add the buttermilk mixture to the flour mixture and fold it in with a spatula just until combined. Do not overmix.
11. Carefully pour the batter over the pineapple into the pan.
12. Bake for 40 minutes, or until the cake is set and golden.
13. Place the pan on a wire rack to cool for at least 30 minutes or longer before removing the springform pan ring and inverting it onto a cake plate.