Illustration Friday - Cake

This is a layer cake that is growing at the Camel Exchange - please feel free to add a layer. Layers so far from JohnnyNorms and Caroline (that's me!).
Rules such as they are can be found here.

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Mixed Media - pineapple upside-down cake (see below for recipe), candles and photo then played with in Painter IX

(And just in case you don't get the joke this really is mixed media, as in mixing a cake... )

It was Jim's birthday during the week so he took today off to make an even longer weekend and of course we baked the cake today too. How convenient!

The recipe we used was a varaition of one featured in the April 2006 issue of BBC Good Food and comes from Gregg Wallace's "Veg, the greengrocer's cookbook".

For the base

1 pineapple (there are lots in the shops at the moment)
3 oz dark muscado sugar
3 oz butter
1.5 oz flaked almonds (as much as we had to hand - the recipe called for 3 oz)
some pecans (to augment the almonds - not used in the original recipe)
8 maraschino cherries (the recipe called for 4oz natural glace ones)

For the batter

9 oz butter
9 oz light muscavado sugar
4 eggs
8 oz plain flour
2 tsp baking powder
2 oz ground almonds
2 tbsp rum (or pineapple juice)

Go out and buy 22cm / 8 in square tin. Wash it.

Oven: 190 C / 170 C (fan) / Gas 5 / 375 F

Peel pineapple. Slice. Discuss how thick the slices ought to be. The recipe says finger-thick... but what sort of specification is that? We found that 4 slices were enough but the picture showed 9... they must have used a much smaller pineapple. Remember to core the slices. It says reseve any juice... well if you used canned that's probably a good suggestion.

Cream butter and sugar. This starts off with you congratulating yourself for having left the butter out to get soft. But then you get sugar and butter over so many utensils that the congratulations stop and you have to clean up a bit before you go on and smooth this mix all over the inside of the 22cm square tin.

Scatter the almonds around getting some on the sides and the bottom of the tin. Place the slices of pineapple neatly in the base. Fill the centres of the pineapple with as many cherries as you can (that was Jim's variation). Add pecans in all the gaps. (Well worth doing as they really were a yummy addition).

Then the best bit of the recipe is where it says "Tip all the batter ingredients into a food processor and blitz until smooth". It forgot to tell me I really ought to have put an apron on first... and that Jim who always remembers his apron will therefore take over this thus leaving me to tidy up...

Pour the batter over the pineapple slices etc.

Bake. It said 50 mins - 1 hour but was cooked after 47 min. We could smell that it was ready. It says you can tell its ready when its puffed up and golden.

Leave the cake to cool in the tin for a bit. It says so that the cake can relax... (What do cakes do to relax?)

Find something on which you can turn it out. In our case that meant putting some foil over the bread board.

Loosen the cake all around the edges gently then put the board on top and turn.

Decorate the cake with candles.

If eating it hot its good with custard and is more like a pudding.

And you really shouldn't look at the estimate of the kcalories per serving...

Of course having read the New Scientist this week you'll know that to lose weight you need to sleep more. (Okay that's a gross over-generalisation)

Then blog it and struggle for a while with blogger to publish it... and get into trouble with IF's Penelope as she thought it was just a photo... but now I've added in the Camel Exchange picture so I should be back within the rules of Illustration Friday except for being in the wrong categories and showing the wrong thumbnail of course...