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Pineapple Upside Down Cake

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Pineapple Upside Down Cake

Pineapple Upside Down Cake

 

This is going to be one of my shorter, less wordy posts. I know…ME… not long winded. What can I say? We all have our days… or in my case, our brief moments. It’s been a long difficult day, I’m totally pooped and I have a headache. But I lurves you all enough that I wanted to get this recipe up before the end of the day anyway. See how good I am to you? 😛

You know the drill… 🙂

Love you all!!!!! <3

Pineapple Upside Down Cake

  • 1 20 ounce can pineapple slices in juice, drained and (you will use about 8 of the slices), slices lain on a paper towel and patted dry
  • 6 Maraschino cherries, drained (optional)
  • 1 2/3 cups flour
  • 2 teaspoons baking powder
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • 1 tablespoon vanilla extract
  • 1 cup sour cream or plain Greek yogurt
  • 1 1/2 sticks unsalted butter, room temp
  • 1/2 cup firmly packed dark brown sugar
  • 1 cup sugar
  • 2 eggs, room temp
  1. Preheat oven to 350 and get out a 10 inch cast iron pan (you can sub a ten inch cake pan, but a cast iron pan is more traditional).  In a small bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder and salt and set aside.
  2. In another small bowl, combine the sour cream or with the vanilla. Also set aside. 😀
  3. Melt 1/2 stick of the butter in the cast iron pan. Just toss the butter in the pan and shove it in the oven for a couple of minutes. When it is melted, sprinkle the brown sugar evenly over the butter. Lay the pineapple slices around the outer edge of the pan. You should be able to fit 6. Use 2 more, broken in quarters, in the spaces in between each slice.
  4. In a large bowl, combine the remaining stick of butter and the sugar. Beat at medium speed with a hand mixer for about 2 minutes; until light and fluffy.
  5. Add the eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition.
  6. Transfer over to a wooden spoon or rubber spatula- alternately fold in the flour mixture and the sour cream mixture (flour, sour cream, flour, sour cream, flour), mixing well after each addition.
  7. Spoon the batter over the pineapple slices and smooth it out.
  8. Bake at 350 for 25 to 30 minutes, or until it is golden brown and a toothpick inserted in the middle comes out clean.
  9. Immediately run a butter knife around the edges of the cake and then invert the pan onto a plate large enough to hold the cake. If any of the fruit sticks to the pan (if you are using a well seasoned pan, it shouldn’t, but…) just lift it out and place it on the cake.
  10. If you actually have any left over, cover well and store at room temp.

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Spicy Pork And Pineapple Chili

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Spicy Pork & Pineapple Chili

Spicy Pork & Pineapple Chili



Don’t even say it. I KNOW it’s May and I’m making chili. But c’mon. Are you going to tell me that from the beginning of May until the first frost, you never make a chili or anything resembling it? Ha! That’s what I thought!

I had a butt ton of pork stew meat that had been in my freezer since approximately the year 1575 and I needed to use it up. But although I’ve got a fairly large amount of pork recipes, I wanted something different. I searched for about 956 hours (not that this post is having any tendency towards exaggeration or anything) and found nothing that excited me. Well, other than some shirtless pics of Matthew Mcconaughey. But that’s neither here nor there.

So I went into our garage for inspiration. I can see the confused looks from here. My husband and I are of the survivalist ilk. Not big time… we have no concrete bunker or 800 semi automatic weapons. but we DO tend to keep a good food supply. it’s been quite helpful during hard financial times….. or when I have 4 pounds of pork stew meat to use up. I scouted around, found some ingredients that said “Hey! Janet! I’d go great in a pork chili!” I tend to listen when food talks to me.

I was really pleased with how this turned out. It is filled with tender meat, sweet chunks of pineapple, all in a spicy sweet sauce. We served this over rice just because that’s how I roll (did I ever mention my sad rice addiction?) but you could have it plain, like any normal chili. This is so amazingly full of flavor… one bite a little bit sweet, one bite with a bit of heat that kind of hits you in the back of the throat, one bite nice and meaty. All in all, this is a top notch chili, if I do say so myself and I will be making it again.

You know the drill…

Spicy Pork And Pineapple Chili

  • 2 tablespoons vegetable oil
  • 1 large onion, chopped (about 1 1/2 cups)
  • 3 cloves garlic, chopped
  • 1 large green pepper, chopped (about 1 cup)
  • 2 stalks celery, chopped (about 1/2 cup)
  • 1 jalapeno, finely diced
  • 12 ounces chorizo, casing removed
  • 2 pounds pork stew meat ( or pork loin {NOT tenderloin}, cubed
  • 1 28 ounce can of green enchilada sauce
  • 12 ounce jar of salsa (I used a pineapple salsa I got at Trader Joes)
  • 1 15 ounce can black beans, drained and rinsed
  • 1 15 ounce can chickpeas (Garbanzos), drained and rinsed
  • 3 tablespoons sugar
  • 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
  • 1/2 tablespoon salt
  • 1/4 cup balsamic vinegar
  • Garnish-
  • sliced green onions
  • grilled pineapple slices (I used my grill pan on the stove)
  • cilantro

 

  1. Pour the oil into a large pot. Add the onion, garlic, green pepper, celery and jalapeno. Cook over low heat until they are limp and tender. Remove from pot to a bowl and set aside.
  2. Crumble the chorizo into the same pot. Cook over medium heat, stirring frequently, until it is cooked through and browned. Spoon out into the same bowl as the veggies and set aside. Leave the oil from the chorizo in the pot
  3. Working batches, brown all of the cubed pork in the remaining oil from the chorizo, removing each batch to the bowl as it gets browned. You may need to drizzle a little vegetable oil in there after the first batch.
  4. After all the pork is browned, dump the bowl with the pork, chorizo and veggies back into the pot. Stir well to combine.
  5. Add the enchilada sauce, the jar of salsa, the can of pineapple chunks, the sugar. the cinnamon and the salt to the pot. Stir well. Cover and cook over low heat for about an hour or until the meat is tender.
  6. Add the drained beans; stir well and leave the cover off of the pot. Cook over low heat, stirring occasionally, for another 30 minutes or until reduced to desired thickness.
  7. Add in the balsamic vinegar; stir well.
  8. Taste for seasoning (salt, more balsamic, a bit more sugar, etc)
  9. Serve plain or over rice. Garnish as desired

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Pineapple Upside Down Cinnamon Rolls

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Pineapple Upside Down Cinnamon Rolls-001

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You may have heard me say more than once that I lov(ed) Twinkies and Ho Ho’s and the like. basically, if it was Hostess, I was there, preservatives or not. I like to delude myself by saying that with all the Hostess cakes I’ve eaten in my life, I should have enough preservatives in me to live to be 400. So when Hostess went bankrupt, I was devastated. I held candlelight vigils every night for a month and still wear the “hair” shirt I made out of old ho ho wrappers.

So when I heard Hostess was coming back in July (bought by some company or another) I stopped the candle light vigils, bought a helicopter and had it flying a “Twinkies are coming back!” banner behind it and knitted a throw rug with a Ding Dong design in the middle.

One of the things I sheepishly admit to liking from them was their packs of cinnamon rolls. That slick icing you could pull off in one horrifyingly large piece, the somewhat dry rolls (especially once you pulled off and ate the vaguely plastic icing)… it was all high on my list of “I have no idea why I like this, but I do” foods, along with gummi candies, combos, liverwurst and lemonheads.

But even I’m not totally delusional. I know that homemade cinnamon rolls are better. And YOU all know ME.  I can’t leave well enough alone and just make something the normal way. I’m genetically mutated and must screw around with a recipe. So I made Pineapple Upside Down Cinnamon Rolls. I had seen the recipe originally in a cookbook and it intrigued me. Well, intrigued was all it could do. The recipe totally sucked.  The dough was soupy and even after adding a couple extra cups of bread flour, was far too sticky to work with and I knew if I kept going, i’d 1) waste more ingredients and 2) even if I got decent textured dough, it would end up overworked. So I tossed it and started over with my tried and true recipe for sweet roll dough from The Fannie Farmer Baking Book, just updated a bit for a stand mixer. Then I made the same type of topping I put on a upside down cake, just different ratios and Bobs your uncle… Pineapple Upside Down Cinnamon Rolls. These are a wonderfully flavored tender yeast roll with a delicious cinnamony/ buttery filing then topped with a buttery/sugary/pineappley (lots of y’s here) topping. Basically, you get two desserts in one for the calories of one dessert PLUS you can feel all self righteous if you have this for breakfast. This is a longer recipe but it comes together fairly quickly and it’s definitely worth the time

You know the drill…

Pineapple Upside Down Cinnamon Rolls

  • Cinnamon Rolls-
  • 2 packages dry yeast
  • 1/4 cup warm water
  • 1 cup milk, warmed
  • 1/2 cup sugar
  • 2 teaspoons salt
  • 1/2 cup unsalted butter, room temp
  • 3 eggs, warmed up in a bowl of warm water
  • 51/4 to 51/2 cups flour
  • Filling-
  • 1 stick unsalted butter, very soft but not melted
  • 1 cup sugar
  • 2 tablespoons cinnamon
  • Topping-
  • 2 20 ounce cans pineapple chunks in juice, well drained
  • 2 sticks unsalted butter
  • 1 1/3 cups dark brown sugar
  • 1 small jar maraschino cherries, drained (optional)
  1. Sprinkle the yeast over the warm water in a small bowl. Stir and let sit for a few minutes so yeast can dissolve.
  2. Combine the milk, sugar, salt and butter in the bowl of a stand mixer and beat will. Stir in the dissolved yeast. Put on the dough hook- add 2 1/2 cups of the flour and beat until the dough comes together in a shaggy mass. Add another 2 1/2 cups flour and on low speed, mix until the dough is smooth and firm.
  3. Feel it with your fingers and if it is tacky (unless your house is very humid, 5 cups should be fine. The original ingredients were for a hand mixer. A stand mixes better and you can usually use a touch less flour to get a good dough.) add about another 1/4 cup flour. Mix at low speed for about 5 minutes. Turn the dough out into a greased bowl; turn the dough to make sure all sides get greased, then cover with plastic and set aside. Let rise until doubled in bulk.
  4. Meanwhile, make your topping and filling. For the filling, in a small bowl, combine the one cup sugar and 2 tablespoons cinnamon. Set aside.
  5. For the topping, combine the butter and brown sugar in a medium saucepan. Bring to a simmer over medium heat, stirring occasionally to mix the sugar. Add the drained pineapple, stir and simmer over medium heat for five minutes. Mixture will seem thin but it will thicken and caramelize as it cooks in the oven.
  6. Grease a 13×9 inch baking pan and preheat oven to 350 degrees. Pour the topping in and make sure to spread the pineapple out to cover the bottom of the pan. If using cherries, randomly top the pineapple mixture with some cherries.
  7. When dough has risen to double it’s original bulk, punch down. Turn out onto a floured board and knead lightly for a minute or so. Roll out into a rectangle of approximately 28 by 12 inches. It doesn’t have to be perfect.
  8. Spread the top of the dough with the very soft butter, Then sprinkle with the cinnamon/sugar mixture. Starting from one of the long sides, roll up tightly like a long jelly roll. Cut the dough into 15 pieces and lay each piece into the prepared pan. You should have the five rows of 3 rolls. Cover lightly with plastic or a damp towel and set aside to rise again. Let rise for about another half hour or until almost doubled in bulk.
  9. Bake at 350 degrees until the rolls are puffy and golden.
  10. Let sit for five minutes then invert pan over either some sheets of foil or a larger pan if you have one. Let excess topping drip down for a minute.
  11. Serve warm… cold…room temp… in a cave… on a horse…eat them any way, Sam I am.

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Hummingbird Bundt Cake

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Hummingbird Bundt Cake-001

Hummingbird Bundt cake- No hummingbirds were harmed in the making of this cake 😀

I’m one of those people whose mind never shuts down. I don’t say this in the tone of “I’m so damn smart, my mind is always working”. On the contrary. I said it never shuts down. Work on the other hand is a totally foreign concept to my brain. If my brain were a person, it would be sitting on the couch in a holey wife beater, holding a beer, chips and the TV remote, burping and watching something like “Nude Alligator Hunters” while it said to my body “make me a sammich, bit**!”. My mind needs therapy.

Point is, my mind annoys me. It will be 3am and the rest of the world is sleeping (ok, the rest in my time zone…who aren’t working 3rd shift…and aren’t insomniac…or watching “Nude Alligator Hunters”. Crap, ok, while SOME other people are sleeping) and my mind is creating story lines that I will forget by morning and never write. Or it will be wondering if the cats are warm enough…or why Bates on Downton Abbey let his estranged wife blackmail him. Or why things have the names they have.

Case in point- this cake. Really? Hummingbird Cake? There is not a Hummingbird in it… not even a stray feather. I had seen the original recipe for the layer cake and I know it’s a fairly old recipe, stemming from at least the Civil War era. Maybe they put Hummingbirds in it then? 😛 As I was saying; I’ve seen the recipe (maybe I should say “the receipt” since this is an old cake) for the layer cake and while it intrigued me, I was always hesitant to make it because it just sounded too sweet, too rich. WAIT!!! Don’t leave! Yes, that was really me that just said the words “too sweet” and “too rich”.  because…well… it did. A fairly rich cake layered with an ultra sweet and rich frosting. Just…too much. So when I saw this recipe for a bundt cake version with the frosting as just a glaze on top, I HAD to try it. The combo of banana and pineapple along with a cream cheese glaze was too much to resist. And oh boy, is it hard to resist. Moist and tender with the tropical flavors blending so well. Then the cream cheese glaze. Really… can you ever go wrong with cream cheese glaze? Plus it goes together quickly. No beating for 90 minutes and alternate adding of ingredients.

I still think I should have put a Hummingbird in it though. But the birds weren’t falling for my sign that said “Free Bird Seed Here… Enter Box Here—>” My son on the other hand… we still need to figure out how to get the box off of his head.

This came from “Southern Living Comfort Foods”

Hummingbird Bundt Cake

  • Cake-
  • 1 1/2 cups pecans, toasted
  • 3 cups flour
  • 2 cups sugar
  • 1 teaspoon baking soda
  • 1 teaspoon cinnamon (I used 2)
  • 1/4 teaspoon salt
  • 3 eggs, lightly beaten
  • 1 1/4 cups mashed bananas (about 4 large)
  • 1 8 ounce can crushed pineapple, undrained
  • 3/4 cup vegetable or canola oil
  • 1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
  • Glaze-
  • 4 ounces cream cheese, room temp
  • 2 cups sifted powdered sugar
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
  • 1 to 2 teaspoons milk
  1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease and flour a 14 cup bundt pan. Sprinkle 1 cup of the pecans on the bottom of the pan, reserving the last 1/2 cup for sprinkling on the glaze.
  2. Stir together flour, sugar, baking soda, salt and cinnamon in a large bowl.
  3. Stir in the eggs, oil, bananas, pineapple and vanilla. Stir just until the dry ingredients are moistened.
  4. Bake at 350 degrees for an hour to an hour and ten minutes or until golden brown and a wooden skewer inserted in center comes out clean.
  5. Let cool in pan on wire rack for 15 minutes, then turn out onto rack to finish cooling for about 2 hours.
  6. For glaze- beat cream cheese until light, then add powdered sugar and beat on LOW speed (unless you like being covered in sugar dust) until well mixed. Add in the milk, a teaspoon at a time, only adding the second one of you need to make it thin enough to pour.
  7. Pour glaze over the top of the cake. Sprinkle with reserved pecans.

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Wanna Drink? Me Neither.

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Pina Colada Panna Cotta With Caramelized Pineapple

I’ve always been a pretty boring person. Other than one period in my life when I was 18/19 I’ve never been a big drinker. There are some things I like such as a glass of wine every once in a while or maybe some Baileys but it’s never been something that is important to me. I’ve also found that as I’ve aged (I’m all of 27 now *cough cough*) I can’t really handle alcohol anyway. Half a glass of wine and my body lets me know “Janet, if you drink ONE sip more of that, I’ll make you pay for it”. Mind you, there are exceptions but they are rare. *Remembers the bottle of whipped cream vodka and my daughter in law Kaitlyn loving it as much as I did* Continue reading →

Sweet(s Potatoes) For The Sweet??

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Ok, time to start putting up recipes suitable for the upcoming Thanksgiving (in the states) and Christmas season. Seems to me that if we bloggers wait till like a week or 2 before the holidays hit to start posting the fun stuff, you readers (and other bloggers) won’t have time to use any of them because if you’re anything like me, you start perusing cookbooks, web sites and blogs for good holiday recipes in like… ohhhhhhh… July. 😛

I absolutely adore holiday cooking! I mean, I love it! My hips? Not so much. But oh well. I’ll do what I do with other things. I’ll make it, enjoy watching others eat the things I cook and only have a little bit myself. But seriously, I have mentioned before that I love this time of year. Not just because I enjoy cooler weather, which I do, or love the coziness of shorter days and longer nights, which I also do, but because I love the foods. Especially the ones traditionally served from Thanksgiving to New Years Day. Cookies (omg, I make a TON every year. It’s a tradition I started when my 3 oldest were young because I didn’t have the money to buy them gifts but I had food and it has never stopped… mainly because my kids would kill me if I tried to stop.), candies (FUDGE!!), desserts of other kinds (I could happily live on my recipe for Pecan Pie – that is, until I went into a coma from too much sugar and died), Turkey, ham, stuffing (do you call it stuffing or dressing?) and various biscuits, scones, muffins and quick breads.

Lord, I think I just gained five pounds from just writing that paragraph above. Plus, my keyboard is covered in drool, darn it.

Moving on… (hehehe…. I wonder now how many times I’ve used that phrase since I started the blog?), where was I? Oh yeah, quick breads. I have always thought that they were called quick breads not because of the ease of prep, though they ARE easy, but because of how quickly they get eaten 😛 . I swear, if I want any when I make them, especially this one, I have to hide a slice… or twelve.

I love sweet potato casserole. Yes, I even love the kind covered in 14,000 mini marshmallows; the one responsible for the 33 million cavities gotten by children during the holidays. I could eat it until it is coming out of my ears.  So when I saw a recipe years ago on food.com for Sweet Potato bread, I had to try it. And it was good. Really really good. But it needed something. If only because I am genetically incapable of leaving a recipe alone. So I played with it. A lot. Until it really no longer resembles the original recipe. I”M SORRY! I’M A HORRIBLE PERSON WHO CHANGES RECIPES!! I NEED REHAB!!!

Ahem. Moving on. This has become a sweet potato casserole pineapple bread. I always put pineapples in my sweet potato casserole and decided to try it in the bread. it worked quite well. It adds a nice subtle tartness that goes oh so well with the dense sweetness of the bread. So give this a try. It is fairly quickly made (though a bit more involved than your normal quick bread) and it’s delicious. Sweet, moist, a fairly dense bread yet still light, with a nice crispy crust.

Sweet Potato Casserole Bread With Pineapple

  • 29 ounce can sweet potatoes, well drained
  • 1/2 cup dark brown sugar
  • 1/4 cup heavy cream
  • 1/4 cup unsalted butter
  • 2 cups sugar
  • 1 cup vegetable or canola oil
  • 3 large eggs
  • 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
  • 1 teaspoon almond extract
  • 1 cup well drained crushed pineapple
  • 3 cups flour
  • 1/4 teaspoon baking soda
  • 1 teaspoon baking powder
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 2 teaspoons sugar
  • 2 teaspoons cinnamon (optional. Sorry bout that Ann. Don’t know how I forgot it in the ingredients at first.)
  • 1 teaspoon ground ginger
  • 1 teaspoon ground cloves
  • 1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
  1. Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Grease and flour 2 loaf pans.
  2. In a medium heavy bottomed saucepan, combine the sweet potatoes, brown sugar, heavy cream and butter. Cook over low heat, stirring frequently, until the butter is melted. Use a potato masher to mash the sweet potatoes well, then continue cooking over low heat until the mixture is thickened and the cream has evaporated, about ten minutes. Set aside and let cool.
  3. As that cools, in a large bowl, combine the eggs, sugar, oil, pineapple and extracts. Beat well. When cooled, add in the sweet potato mixture and beat well.
  4. In another bowl, mix together the flour, baking soda, baking powder and spices.
  5. Combine this with the wet ingredients. Mix JUST until combined. never over mix quick bread or muffin batters. You’ll end up with tough tunnely (yes that too is now a word cause I said so) bread.
  6. Bake at 325 until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean; about 70 to 80 minutes.
  7. Let cool in pan on wire rack for five minutes then turn out onto the rack to finish cooling.
  8. Enjoy!!

Have Rice Will… Kill All Nutritional Value In It

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I have heard a lot of people decry pudding as a boring dessert alternative. I completely disagree. Pudding is awesome darn it! Smeared all over… ok, wait, let’s change the tangent I was about to go off on there. My bad. :-P  Where was I? Pudding is awesome. When I was a kid back in the 60’s and 70’s (yes, I’m older than most other bloggers. I like to think that makes me wiser and smarter and more experienced and a better cook… and far cuter. Or something like that.) when most women were entering the work force for the first time, pudding meant the dry powder in a box mixed with milk because none of our mothers had the time to actually MAKE pudding home made. I have to admit to still having a certain fondness for the Butterscotch flavor. I still buy it as well as the newer types of pudding that have come out. The Jello Temptations are pretty darn good and are low calorie and Jello brands sugar free Creme Brulee Rice Pudding is…wait for it… “to die for” *grins cause you all know what I think of that phrase 😛 .

But rice pudding for me has always been a sort of comfort food and nothing beats home made. But… *sighs deeply*… being me, I am never content to leave well enough alone. Nooooooo… I have to mess with things I like to try and make more things I like. Like I did last night with rice pudding. Mind you, it worked. Quite nicely. But now I have a craving for regular warm rice pudding covered in a few pounds of Cinnamon (sorry Ann … I know you can’t do Cinnamon. But that’s why you should keep reading :-P). But until I decide to make that, this is a wonderful Summery alternative. If you like coconut (no coconut pieces in it cause I just don’t care for the texture as much as I love the flavor) and Pineapple, you should love this. Plus, if you want to lighten it, it can be done by using low fat coconut milk, lighter milk and light or fat free whipped topping instead of the heavy cream. The Greek yogurt in this adds a nice tang as well as some extra nutrition. All in all, while this isn’t exactly great for you (this IS me after all 😛 ), it’s certainly not BAD for you either if you use lighter ingredients. I hope you like it! There was no way to really photograph rice pudding to make it look exciting lol, but it sure does taste good 😀 This makes a lot so it could be cut in half if needed.

 Pina Colada Rice Pudding With A Greek Yogurt Twist

  • 4 cups cooked rice (I used leftover Basmati Coconut rice but any cooked rice would do. I actually think this would be better with plain white rice. )
  • 2 cans coconut milk (I used full fat cause the low fat tastes watery to me in all the brands I have tried but you could sub low fat)
  • 1 cup milk
  • 2 cups sugar
  • 1 teaspoon coconut extract
  • 1 tablespoon vanilla extract
  • 1 20 ounce can pineapple chunks, well drained
  • 1 cup heavy cream, whipped or 1 1/2 cups whipped topping
  • 1 cup Greek yogurt (I used honey flavored because it was what I had on hand)
  1. In a medium heavy bottomed (preferably non stick) sauce pot, combine the cooked rice and the coconut milk. Stir well to mix. Over medium heat, bring the mix to a gentle boil stirring very often.
  2. Turn heat down to low (I had it on two) and cover. Cook the rice until all the liquid is absorbed, stirring frequently to prevent sticking. Mine took about 30 minutes.
  3. Pour mixture into a large bowl and cover and refrigerate until chilled, at least 2 hours.
  4. When rice is cold, mix the whipped cream (or whipped topping) with the Greek yogurt.
  5. Break up the rice pudding (it will be stiff) and fold the cream/yogurt mixture into it.
  6. Add the drained pineapple and mix well. Refrigerate until you’re ready to serve.

That Bread Pudding Thing Again

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I’ve mentioned before my love/hate relationship with bread pudding. I love to hate it. More specifically I love to hate the insipid things that some pass off as bread pudding. Stale white bread from the grocery store mixed with 2%milk (or worse… let’s make bread pudding healthy and use skim. Ummm.. gag?) and a handful of raisins and some cinnamon cooked until it is a hardened pile of gunk. I’ll take Twinkies instead thank you. On that note though, I cringe every time I see recipes for bread pudding that use things like Twinkies or doughnuts. Even I have some health standards (says the woman about to give you a recipe using 3 cups of heavy cream. But hey! If it were also made with Twinkies, it would be even worse! So see? I DO care for your arteries!! I do, I do I do!)

I do though love to play with bread pudding. Not THAT way… get your mind out of the gutter ! I like to take flavors that one typically sees elsewhere (like my apricot white chocolate bread pudding that I more or less based on the idea of white chocolate dipped apricots) and turn them into bread pudding. So many things can be done with a loaf of a sweet bread (or french or Italian in the case of savory bread puddings), some rich custard and simple ingredients. You can take what started out generations ago as a way to use up leftovers and feed people a hearty breakfast (or lunch or dinner or dessert) and turn it into something that even die hard bread pudding haters (such as me) will love.

I decided I wanted to try a take on one of my favorite desserts; Pineapple Upside Down Cake. I didn’t want it inverted though. I wanted the bulk of the pineapple in it as well as the accompanying flavors (brown sugar and butter. YUM!) with the rest of those flavors in a sauce for over the top of it. I think this turned out rather well. I made it in mini spring form pans which technically are big enough for two servings. I say technically because I will stab with my fork anyone who gets near the one I am eating. yes, yes, I AM meek mild and gentle. Why do you ask? Back to the pudding…or…erhmmm, moving on 😀 The edges of these got all crispy and caramelized and sticky from the brown sugar and the natural sugars in the pineapple and that alone makes these oh so good. Add in the caramelly flavor of the pudding itself with the tang of the pineapple pieces then the creamy custard and rich sauce and I was in heaven. I am so so glad that I usually eat very little of what I make (as I’ve said before, I prefer to NOT weigh 600 pounds thank you very much) because then I won’t feel so guilty if I eat a whole mini cake of this.

Pineapple Upside Down Bread Pudding

With Creamy Pineapple Amaretto Sauce

  • SAUCE-
  • 1 20 ounce can crushed pineapple in juice, drained
  • 1 20 ounce can pineapple chunks in heavy syrup, drained, 1/2 cup syrup reserved
  • 1 1/2 cups dark brown sugar
  • 1/4 cup (1/2 stick) unsalted butter
  • 1/4 cup Amaretto liquor
  • 1 cup heavy cream
  • PUDDING-
  • 4 large eggs
  • 1 1/4 cups dark brown sugar
  • 2 cups heavy cream
  • 1 tablespoon vanilla extract
  • 1/4 cup amaretto (or sub 2 teaspoons almond extract)
  • 1/4 cup unsalted butter, melted
  • 1 loaf Kings Hawaiian Bread, cut into small cubes
  1. Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Grease 6 mini spring-form pans or a two quart baking dish.
  2. In a medium heavy bottomed sauce pan, combine all sauce ingredients other than the cream.
  3. Bring to a boil over medium high heat. Lower heat to a simmer and let cook for about 20 minutes, stirring occasionally. Set aside to cool somewhat while you prepare pudding.
  4. In a large bowl, beat the eggs. Add in the brown sugar and beat until well blended. Add the vanilla, reserved 1/2 cup pineapple syrup, melted butter, the 2 cups of heavy cream and the amaretto. Mix well.
  5. Add 2 cups of the pineapple mixture, mixing well.
  6. Take the cubed bread and add to the cream mixture, pressing down with a spoon, fork, knife, shovel, whatever makes you happy, making sure to get all the bread submerged in the liquid. Let sit for at least 30 minutes to give the bread time to soak up the custard mix.
  7. Divide mixture between 6 greased mini spring-form pans (or a 2 quart pan, preferably glass, could be used) and bake at 325 for about 60 minutes or until you can stick a knife in the center of the custard and have no liquid custard seep up into the hole.
  8. Set aside to cool, still in the pans, for at least 2 hours (or take one out like I did and eat it piping hot and burn your tongue off. That works too.).
  9. While it is cooling, go back to your sauce. Eat a spoonful and moan cause it’s yummy and just like the stuff on pineapple upside down cake.
  10. Add the 1 cup of heavy cream to the pineapple sauce. Bring to a simmer over medium heat, stirring constantly. Let simmer for ten minutes, still stirring often.  Set aside.
  11. Carefully remove the sides and bottom of the spring-form pans. Put each pudding onto a serving plate and serve with some of the pineapple amaretto cream sauce