joeyfullystated

I don’t know when I came to love pineapple upside down cake, but I mean, it’s cake and pineapple, what’s not to love? And cherries? These are a few of my favorite things!

I make most of my cakes from scratch. It’s not hard. I tell you like I tell my kids, the stuff in box mix is the stuff that would go in the dry bowl. The bag saves measuring time and a dirty bowl — and some days, that’s great. Unfortunately, the stuff in box mix also has crap no one should eat. I’m not gonna get into it, so let’s just say it’s stuff the box company would call enhancers. I call it crap. I am allergic to a lot of crap, so I’m on a low-crap diet. I’m not even sposta have red dye and the cherries are loaded with it, so this is a big treat for me. I went all out, thank you anti-histamines.

(My mother is shaking her head, don’t look.)

I do NOT make pineapple upside-down cake from scratch. Initially, I made queries into recipes, but they either used oil instead of butter or they used water instead of juice and some of them didn’t even have baking powder in them, which left me all skeptical about the spongy tastiness of said recipes. (When you cook and bake a lot, you get this sorta feel for how things should be, and when it’s not as you feel it should be, you get turned off.)

Hence, my reliable friend Betty Crocker.

This is my husband’s favorite cake. To him, it’s yellow cake. He likes it with chocolate icing. To me, it’s butter cake and a bitch to frost, scratch even worse. To my nephew, it’s plain cake. Plain cake, mmhm. We don’t know why. Sometime in his adolescence I asked him what his favorite cake was and he said, “Plain cake.”
“I’d thought carrot. What the hell is plain cake?”
“I don’t know. It’s yellow, but not lemon.”
“Okay.”
You’ll notice Betty Crocker calls it Butter Yellow. Simon would call it Plain Butter Yellow, I suppose.

You know I don’t do recipes, but I do directions now and again. Cream butter, add eggs, replace water with pineapple juice, add vanilla, pour in crap bag.

The joy of pineapple upside down cake is the topping, which starts on the bottom.

Melting butter in a cast iron skillet, covering with brown sugar, arranging pineapples and cherries. People get into this, and artfully, I might add. I’ve seen several Pinterest-worthy arrangements. I’ve even seen different fruits. I wouldn’t think one could go wrong, but people are astounding and have proven me wrong, which is why I don’t post recipes.

But I sure do post photos.

Were I taking this somewhere, I’d cover the bottom and make a glaze, but for me, this was —

Well, it’s gone now.
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