Pineapple Upside-Down Cake

When I first found out about the AFAM event, I knew at once which fruit I was waiting for. That's right pineapple, so I could make the pineapple upside down cake! I had bookmarked the original recipe from the Betty Crocker Webpage and finally got round to making it! Without much ado, here is the recipe.

Ingredients:
1/4cup butter or margarine
1/4 cup packed brown sugar
1 can (8 oz) pineapple slices, drained, cut in half
1/3 cup chopped pecans
8-9 Maraschino cherries
1.5 cups Original Bisquick® mix
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1/2 cup milk or water
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 egg

Method:
Pre-Heat Oven to 350°F.
Put butter in a 9 inch round baking dish and melt it in the oven.
Remove dish and melted butter and sprinkle with the brown sugar (as evenly as you can)
Arrange the pineapple pieces and place a cherry in the center of each pineapple. Drop the chopped pecans in all the spaces left. I ran out of pecans so it looks somewhat scantily covered. Do feel free to be very generous with the pecans, it will only make it taste better.
In a large bowl mix the remaining ingredients well (to form the cake batter)
Bake 35-40 minutes till the cake is done.
Remove from oven and immediately turn the cake upside down to remove from baking dish (so the pineapple side is on the top).

While on the blog patrol, I found another recipe for Pineapple Upside-Down Cake posted by Trupti. See her version here.

Pumpkin Spice Cake

When I heard that the next JFI ingredient selected by Rosie was ginger, I was thrilled, this one would be a breeze. I use ginger in most of my cooking. Be it daal, chole, rajma, chicken, mutton and most types of fish… it is easier for me list out the few dishes I make that do not use ginger! However, I thought it would be nice to try out something I had never made before.. Hmmm, maybe not so easy after all. So I searched the web and came up with this cake. The recipe is from Betty Crocker's recipes and I have made some modifications to suit the ingredients I had at hand.

Ingredients:
4 eggs
2 cups granulated sugar
1 cup vegetable oil
1 can (15 oz) pumpkin (not pumpkin pie mix)
2 cups Bisquick mix (original recipe used 2 cups all purpose flour and 1 tsp baking soda)
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg powder (original recipe uses cloves)
1 cup chopped pecans (or any other nut or even raisins would work fine)

Method:
Lightly grease a large baking pan. I used 13x10x2 sized pyrex dish. This cake is large and comes out better if baked more flat and spread out.
Pre-heat oven to 350 degrees.
In a large bowl mix the following well till smooth - eggs, oil, sugar, pumpkin.
Add cinnamon, ginger, salt, nutmeg and baking powder and fold into the batter
Gently fold in flour (or Bisquick) and mix well till the batter is smooth with no lumps.
Pour into baking dish and bake till a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean (Took about 30 min for me)

The original recipes also suggests a frosting, which I skipped altogether. The end result was a delicious, super moist cake, which I'll certainly make again!

Thanks Rosie for hosting this event!

Handy Hint:I was out of baking soda so used Bisquick instead. You can use it for any cake recipe, just reduce/remove the amount of baking soda you use. Bisquick is basically flour with some baking soda pre-mixed in it and has always worked quite well for me.