Lisa's Birthday Cake - Easy Pineapple Upside Down Cake

My friend Lisa's birthday is tomorrow. She's going to be 31 so I asked her if she wanted a birthday cake and she not only told me yes, but was specific on the type of cake she wanted: Pineapple Upside Down Cake. We're having her party tonight at PF Changs, and after we have stuffed ourselves, we'll drive back home for cake!

This is my first time making this kind of cake, and this is the way I chose to do it. I want you to know although I love Lisa, I was feeling particularly lazy after a bad experience this morning at Sears, so lazy baking is the key today. This will not be a from scratch cake - but lets call it semi-homemade.



I started this cake by getting out a box of yellow cake mix. You can use whatever you want but when I make a boxed cake, I do like Pillsbury because they make a nice moist cake. If you are feeling more daring you can make it from scratch.



Next you can take out your bowl and spoon - or in my case, my Kitchen-aide mixer (you can tell I'm feeling particularly lazy today) and prepare the cake exactly as it says to on the box. Normally these things call for oil, water and eggs.



While that mixes itself up, I took 1/4 cup of margarine and cut it up into pats and laid it on a 13x9 baking pan. You can use up to 1/2 cup if you'd like, I simply didn't have that much margarine laying around.



After that you need a cup of loosely packed brown sugar, light or dark. You need to sprinkle that over the top of the margarine and pop it into your 350 degree oven while it is preheating.

In about 5 minutes take it out because everything should have melted together nicely, you can stir it around and make sure it's all nice and even on the bottom of the pan... (I forgot to take a picture of that step, sorry!)



The melting butter and sugar does make a nice smell in the tiny ass kitchen that flows through the tiny ass apartment, so of course Gracie is now there to supervise.



Now for the fruit! I'm using Dole pineapples (since Danny ran out and got these things for me) and a small jar of maraschino cherries. Drain both of them, or at least the pineapple if you want to fish your cherries out of the jar.



Once that is done you can start layering your fruit onto the sugar/margarine mixture. I wanted to use as much as I could in the cake because I like lots of pineapple on the cake, as well as cherries.



Now that that is done you will take you cake batter and pour it gently on top of the fruit and sugar. Make sure you also even this out gently so everything is evenly covered.



All you do now is pop it into your 350 degree oven and bake it for about 35 minutes.



When it is all done it looks like this. Not that impressive, but let's turn it over, so the upside down pineapple is now right-side up.



I can't wait for Lisa to try this tonight. I hope she enjoys it just as much as the ones her mom use to make, otherwise it's back to the drawing board!