Pineapple Upside Down Cake

This is one cake I've made many times over. It is supposed to be the one cake that Appa loves. For some reason, I always remembered this recipe as being extremely complicated. It had been a while since I baked this last. At least 7 or 8 years, if I remember right. For years, I followed the recipe that Tarla Dalal's book, "The Pleasures of Vegetarian Cooking" carries. This afternoon, I used my own recipe, but followed her method.

My friend had bought a can of pineapple slices and had been after me to make this Pineapple Upside Down Cake for a few weeks now. Finally, the muhurtam for this cake came today. After an elaborate lunch of mixed vegetable sambar, cluster beans curry and zucchini kootu, we set out to make the cake. I don't know if it is just that I've baked a lot more in the last 2-3 years or if I interpreted the recipe differently earlier. Even the "original" recipe didn't seem very complicated today.

My friend's 5 year old helped me by breaking the eggs into the bowl, helping hold my hand mixer while I mixed the batter and later, she placed the cherries decoratively after some deliberation about where all the candied cherries could be placed.

Here is the recipe:

4 slices Canned Pineapple

Candied Cherries for Decroration

4 tbsp Golden Syrup

1 cup Flour
1/2 cup Sugar
1 tsp Baking Powder

1/4 tsp Baking Soda
a Pinch of Salt
1/2 cup Milk

1/4 cup Oil
1/2 tsp Pineapple Essence
1 Egg, beaten

Preheat the oven to 400F (200 C).

Prepare an 8 inch square cake tin by greasing it and dusting it with flour. Arrange the pineapple slices and the cherries decoratively in the tin. Pour the golden syrup over the slices, making sure that the entire base of the tin is covered.

Sift the flour with the baking powder, baking soda and salt.

In a mixing bowl, add the egg, milk, sugar, oil, and pineapple essence. Beat well together. Add the flour mixture to this and blend well.

Pour the batter over the pineapple slices. Bake for 30 minutes or until a knife/skewer, inserted into the centre of the cake, comes out clean.

Cool the cake and transfer the cake onto a plate. Cut into slices and enjoy! My dear friend's daughter Dhwani turns three today. This little cake is being sent to the Netherlands through this blog just so she can enjoy it today. Happy Birthday Dhwani.

Pineapple Rasam

I do not know about the origins of this dish. And I haven't bothered to find out. I've had it at several functions, at my cousin's place and have loved this enough to have it served at my wedding. (I am half Konkani and half Tamil, married to a Telugu. Our wedding was mostly Konkani Saraswat followed by some Telengana rituals, but the food was completely Iyengar! Equal representation, isn't it?)


I attempted to make this some time ago. We bought a pineapple (atrociously expensive) because I love the fruit. We ate some, I used some up in Pineapple Sasam and with what was left, I made this rasam.


I don't know how "authentic" this recipe is. I made it partly from taste and partly from memories of Amma or my cousin making it. I loved it and savoured it to the last drop.


1/2 cup Pineapple, chopped
1/2 cup Tomatoes, chopped
400 ml Toor Dal Water (Use plain water if need be)
2 tbsp Cooked Toor Dal
1 tbsp Rasam Powder
1/4 tsp Asafoetida
1/2 tsp Pineapple Essence
1 tsp Jaggery
Juice of 1 lime or 1 tbsp Tamarind Paste (I do a half and half)
Coriander Leaves for garnish
Salt to Taste


For the tempering:
1 tsp Oil or Ghee
1/4 tsp Mustard Seeds
7-8 Curry Leaves


In a vessel, take the dal water and dal and add the asafoetida, salt and rasam powder. Add the tomatoes, pineapple, pineapple essence, jaggery and tamarind paste of and bring to a boil. (If using lime juice, do not add it at this stage. Add it at the very end and boil once.) Simmer it for 4-5 minutes.

In a small kadhai, heat the oil or ghee, add the mustard seeds, and when they splutter, add the curry leaves.Add this to the rasam. Garnish with chopped coriander leaves.

You can drink this as a soup or have it with rice. Mangalorean blood runs deep in my arteries and that is probably a reason why I love this sweet and sour number which is not very popular among many.

Pineapple Sasam

Hot and sweet at the same time? Is that possible? Outside of Indian Chinese? Yes. Konkani food can be sweet, sour and hot all at once.

Sasam is a very simple dish made with mango, pineapple or mixed fruits. The name is derived from the main ingredient, sasam, or mustard.

Ingredients:

1 cup Pineapple, chopped

2 tbsp grated Jaggery

Salt to taste

To be ground to a paste:

½ cup scrapped coconut

2-3 red chillies

1 tsp Mustard seeds

Place the pineapple pieces in a bowl and add the jaggery and salt. Allow it to marinate a bit.

Grind the ingredients for the paste. Add this to the pineapple and mix well. Chill and serve.

An amchi favourite at weddings and when the fruits are in season, this goes to Asha for the RCI Karnataka event. Mustard being the main flavouring ingredient here, this also goes to Sunita for her monthly event Think Spice... Think Mustard.

Tropical Cupcakes

Sig wins! It is her event after all, but yes, she guessed it right. I did bake a cake. Correction. I baked several mini cakes.

We did a lot of shopping on S's birthday. Apart from things for him and things for me, we bought things for the kitchen and the blog specifically. We got some nice ceramic stuff at throwaway prices and I bought a few just to photograph my food in. We also found muffin pans that fit my microwave. I don't have the luxury of a cooking range in this house and so we bought a microwave-grill-convection-combination oven and I never found muffin pans that fit. So when I found those at the I.N.A. market along with the Appey Kayli (special pan to make Appeys), I went ahead and just bought them.




I modified the Golden Glow Cake recipe to come up with this recipe. I thought of all the tropical flavours that I could pair Litchi with. I decided to use coconut and pineapple as I thought these would go well with the litchi flavour.




I used:

1 cup Flour
2 1/2 tsp Baking Powder
1/2 cup Demerara Sugar
1/2 tsp Salt
1/4 cup Oil
1 egg
1/4 cup Cocount Milk
1/2 tsp Pineapple Essence
1/4 cup Litchi Juice

Sift all the dry ingredients for the cake together into a food processor jar with the dough blade. Pour in all the liquid ingredients and run the processor for 2 minutes.

Prepare muffin pans by first smearing a little butter all over the cups and then dusting them with flour.

Divide the batter equally between the pans and bake for 15 minutes at 350 F. The cakes are done when a knife or skewer inserted into them comes out clean. Remove the cakes from the tins and cool completely.

Pour a little Litchi Sauce over these cupcakes when you are ready to serve them. They taste divine. I just replaced milk with a combination of coconut milk and litchi juice, the sugar with demerara sugar, the butter with oil and the vanilla essence with pineapple essence. What I was left with was a very 'tropical' cake batter.

We've enjoyed these fresh out of the oven and also after they went cold. I didn't think I could just replace ingredients to suit my preference (or that of Sig's!!). But guess what? I actually could. And the end result was simply divine.

Hopefully, this will be the last dessert I make for some time. Given that we're just two people, and ones who don't need dessert, I will stick to normal healthy food for the next few weeks.

So, this is another entry to the A Fruit A Month (AFAM) event hosted by Sig of Live to Eat.