A Pair of Upside Down Cakes/Cooking with Betty Crackpot

I am currently facilitating a baking group at my local mental health clubhouse, which is part of my volunteer requirements for the peer support training program I'm in.  Once a week, we bake something simple that can be accomplished in 2 hours, and recently I was asked if I could use up a pineapple that the clubhouse had on had that had gone overripe.  It was a pretty pathetic looking specimen, but once I cut into I thought it would be OK for a pineapple upside down cake.  I sliced up the pineapple and went ahead with the project.

It turned out superbly!  The recipe for the cake is Betty Crackpot's Dinette Cake, and you can find that recipe here.  For the upside down part of the cake, i.e. the bottom, mix together 1/4 cup melted butter and 1/2 cup of packed brown sugar. Spread evenly over the bottom of the cake pan. Arrange pineapple slices on top, make the cake batter, then spread it evenly over the pineapple.  I know this is supposed to have maraschino cherries in it, but honestly, it didn't need them (and they're not in my budget).  Here is the cake!

Pineapple Upside Down Cake

Also, very recently, I went over to some friends' place and divested them of all their rhubarb.  Two of these friends had never had rhubarb before, and one didn't like it, so the rhubarb plant was basically going to waste.  After the success of my pineapple upside down cake, I decided to make a rhubarb version.  And this is it:

Rhubarb Upside Down Cake

 Same deal with the bottom, except rhubarb needs a bit of help.  I used about a cup and a half of finely chopped rhubarb, and combined it with about 1/4 cup of sugar, and some cinnamon & ground ginger.

This was TO.DIE.FOR.  In fact, it's one of the best things I think I've ever baked!

I loved it!  And I ate 3/4 of it in four days, I'm slightly sheepish to admit.  I gave the other quarter to a friend.

I have in the freezer a bag of wild blackberries.  I think I'll make a blackberry upside down cake next!

Latest "Coyote's Kitchen" Article

Here is my latest column in Bread 'n Molasses magazine! Enjoy!

Chicken & Pineapple Curry - Hold the Flies

I love pineapple - it's one of my favourite fruits. They had pineapple on sale at my local over-priced grocery store this week, so I decided to get one. I'm pretty picky when it comes to my fruit, and since it's sometimes hard to gauge the ripeness of pineapples in the grocery store, I kinda have to go with my gut. I picked on out and went with it. I sat it on my counter as I usually do, partially because I was too lazy to chop it up, partially because I was waiting to see if it would ripen any more.

What a mistake! Less than two days later, I caught a whiff of my pineapple at the opposite end of my kitchen and knew I had to take action. When I cut the peel off, I could see that it was way past ripe and verging on...yucky. I chucked what parts of it seemed inedible and chopped & refrigerated the rest of it. The scraps went into the garbage. This was yesterday.

Today, I have an infestation of fruit flies in my kitchen garbage can. They are feasting on pineapple cores and peels, and seem to be making their way around the house. My roommate has a fruit bowl well away from the garbage and there has been some action there. I have also noticed the buggers fluttering around my office - and there is no food up here.

Garbage day is Wednesday, and it's hot out. We have special bags we have to put our garbage in in this town in order for our garbage to be collected on garbage day. These bags cost $1.50 each, so we can't just replace the bag and put the old bag with the peelings in it somewhere else. We live in bear country, so garbage has to be kept under lock and key until the day of collection.

So, what to you do?

You make curry.

I have no idea what to do about the fruit flies in the garbage, but I do know that pineapple goes well with curry flavours. I happened to have a bottle of Maya organic curry sauce on hand that I got in the bargain bin at my local over-priced grocery store for $1.99. I had an onion. I had some chicken and some rice. I even had some wilty and nearly finished cilantro in my crisper.

I managed to use half of my fresh pineapple in this recipe. And it was a very good dinner, if I do say so myself.

As for the flies, there were no left overs for them, but I doubt they'll be any the wiser.

Chicken & Pineapple Curry (serves 2 or 1 hungry person)

1 boneless, skinless chicken breast, cubed
1 medium onion, sliced
2 cups chopped fresh pineapple
1 clove garlic
1/4 cup chopped cilantro
1/3 cup (or to taste) curry cooking sauce of your choice (Patak's is my favourite brand, and you could use, instead of a curry cooking sauce, some curry paste, a bit of tomato sauce, and some sour cream or yogur to get a similar result)
basmati rice, to serve

Brown the chicken in a TBSP of olive oil. Add onions & pineapple. Saute for five or so minutes. Add sauce and garlic. Simmer another 5 - 10 minutes. Top with cilantro; serve over rice.

I suppose you could use canned chunks of pineapple if you really must - but there is no comparison between fresh and canned, in my opinion. Canned does have its place, for sure; I just prefer the fresh, and once you know how to peel and core it, it's very easy to just chop it up and put it in your fridge.

Also, pineapple contains an enzyme that helps the digestion of protein, so it's a good idea to have it with meat, actually. I could have made any number of desserts, but for some reason, this idea appealed to me the most tonight. And I have enough left-overs for a second meal tomorrow night.

Enjoy!

Pineapple Carrot Cake with Cream Cheese Icing

IMG_0823
Originally uploaded by wanderingcoyote.

Never been a huge fan of carrot cake. It's always seemed a little...weird, I guess. I mean carrots? In a cake? How fun is that? But, despite my judgements, I am, if nothing else a dessert addict, so if it was all on offer I'd indulge. This week, I had a request from my roommate's sister, who wanted to serve this to guests. Because I'm not a fan of carrot cake, I don't have many recipes for it. When this lady asked me to make the cake, I really had to search for a recipe. I have one from school that has blueberries in it, but the recipe was too big and there aren't a lot of inexpensive blueberries kicking around right now. There's a carrot sponge in one of my professional books, but it was too big, too, and had ingredients in it I didn't have on hand. I eventually found this recipe in Anna Olson's Sugar.

A few words about Anna. Anna has a show on the Food Network entitled Sugar. It was upon watching an episode of this show while on holiday in Vancouver nearly three years ago (where the Food Network is on cable; in Ottawa we needed a cable box) that I discovered there was an occupation entitled "pastry chef." I knew there were bakers, but I'd never really heard of pastry chefs. I knew, upon seeing Anna on TV, that I wanted to be a pastry chef. A couple of days later, I went to hang out on Granville Island, and there I saw the culinary school I would graduate top of my class from a year and a half later.

Unfortunately, fame has changed Anna. I think she's sold out. You can now see her pimping Pilsbury products and Starbucks in ads appearing on the Food Network, particulalry around Christmas time. I noticed also she's lost weight, which she totally didn't need to do, and gotten a new hairdo - probably because of the ads. She now looks more like a sex kitten than the pastry chef I came to love.

This is a fabulous recipe. It's rich and moist, and the cream cheese icing is to die for. Don't substitute any other kind of syrup for the maple syrup; the lady I made this for, who was buying the ingredients, wanted to put pancake syrup in it to cut down on costs, but there's so much crap in pancake syrup, and the flavour would be totally different. This is a really easy recipe to put together, too, and if you have a bored someone or other at home, get him/her to grate the carrots for you.

Pineapple Carrot Cake with Cream Cheese Icing

Cake:
3/4 cup vegetable oil
3/4 cup packed brown sugar
3 eggs
1/4 cup pure maple syrup
2 tsp grated fresh ginger
1 2/3 cups all purpose flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp cinnamon
2 cups grated carrot (approximately 2 medium sized carrots, peeled)
1 cup pineapple diced or crushed, fresh or tinned (drained)

Icing
4 oz/125g cream cheese at room temperature (I used light, but you cannot use the fat free kind so don't bother trying; the amount is equivalent to half a brick)
1/4 cup unsalted butter, at room temperature
1 1/2 cups icing sugar, sifted
1 1/2 tsp vanilla extract

For the cake, preheat the oven to 325F and grease & flour an 8" square cake pan. In a large bowl, whisk together the oil, eggs, sugar, maple syrup, and ginger. Sift in the dry ingredients and blend well with whisk or wooden spoon, just be sure not to over mix. Mix in the carrots and pineapple. Pour into pan and bake for 1 - 1 1/2 hours, or until tester inserted in centre comes out clean. Make sure you cool it completely before icing it.

For the icing, beat the cream cheese and butter together until smooth./ Beat in the icing sugar and vanilla until smooth. Spread on top of cake and refrigerate until ready to serve.

How hard is that? Not very, and if you have carrot cake skeptics out there like me, I'm sure you can win them over with this recipe.

Bon appetit!