Birthday Cake, Vintage Style

So what did we make for George's birthday cake this weekend?

Here it is:

And it was delicious.

This is the recipe we used.

Pineapple Upside Down Cake

Heat the oven to 350 degrees.

Topping:

• 1/2 cup of butter, melted
• 1 and 1/3 cups of packed light brown sugar
• 12 pineapple rings (it takes more than one can for this recipe, so you'll have leftover rings to eat--that's a good problem to have)
• 12 maraschino cherries (drain and remove their stems)

Melt the butter in a microwave or on the stove top. Pour into a 10x14 baking pan (we used a glass pan). Add the brown sugar and mix well. Arrange the pineapple slices on top of the butter-sugar mixture and place a cherry in the center of each pineapple ring.

 Cake:

• 2 and 2/3 cups all-purpose flour (I had bread flour on hand so we used that)
• 2 cups of granulated sugar
• 2/3 cup of shortening
• 3 teaspoons of baking powder
• 1 teaspoon of salt
• 1 and 1/2 cups of milk
•  2 eggs

 Mix all cake ingredients with an electric mixer for 30 seconds on low speed and then for 3 minutes on high speed. You may need to scrape down the bowl to be sure all ingredients are completely mixed in as you are beating. (This is a little different--with most cakes you mix wet and dry ingredients separately, then beat together by adding a little of the dry ingredients alternately with the milk to the other wet ingredients. However this worked very well--the cake is not as fine-textured as most cakes but the taste is delicious.)

A little segue here--

Grace and I did not use an electric mixer. We used my old manual cake mixer that I used to use when we didn't have electricity. It works very well and gives the user a good aerobic workout in the process.

The gears on top provide a lot of velocity to the paddles as they mix.

Mixed!

Now where were we?

Pour the cake batter evenly over the pineapple/cherry mixture. Back for about 50-60 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. Remove from the oven and invert onto a serving plate--leave the baking pan over the cake for a few minutes before removing it to be sure all of the topping comes loose and remains on top of the cake instead of in the pan.

The finished product, with beautiful baker: