Rum, pineapple, & Walter's favourite cake

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“Is there any more of that pineapple cake?” Walter asked. 

“You ate it all,” Jasmine said. “I’m so glad you liked it!”

“Most excellent,” he replied, and burped.

Carlotta waved her hand in front of her face. “How much rum was in that, Jasmine?”

“One thousand millilitres.”

“How much?”

She winced. “I might’ve read it wrong. It did seem like a lot when I had to go and buy another bottle. And you’re meant to burn the alcohol off, but it wouldn’t light. I only ended up singeing the pineapple.” “

It was perfect,” Walter said, with great satisfaction, and yawned.

 

The risk of baked goods-related mishaps is ever-present when writing Beaufort.

I mean, baked goods are writer fuel, we all know that (accompanied by vast quantities of tea, obviously), but when one keeps writing about the Toot Hansell Women’s Institute using various cakes and bakes and slices to charm their way into crime scenes, fortify themselves for marketplace brawls, or provide fuel for stake-outs, it’s basically impossible not to start eyeing the contents of the baking cupboard (or basket, in my case).

And then, of course, it’s necessary to employ the Kim Method (TM) of recipe research, in order to create the bonus recipes for the books. That’s not something one can put off till last minute, naturally. No, one needs to do it well ahead of time, probably when one should be doing one’s accounts …

Which, you know, isn’t really an issue. As mentioned, baked goods are writer fuel, and it’s always best to have some stock on hand.

However.

It’s really hot.

If you're a member of our Toot Hansell Auxiliary community on Circle, you might remember my bourbon cream recipe (and the accompanying cat bum biscuits), where I explained that I’d ended up with a bit of an outdoor kitchen on the balcony due to the fact it’s currently around 31C / 88F inside the apartment all day, which means turning the oven on is something I really do not want to do. And the pizza oven is fab for many things, as long as they’re flat things.

Which meant I had to get a tiny bit inventive on this cake. My options were:

1. Don’t bake a cake. (But I wanted to bake a cake).
2. Bake a flat cake. (That … seems like it would not be a cake? Although I suppose I could’ve done a skinny sponge and layered it, but I’m still scarred by the Battenberg sponge ordeal.)
3. Turn the oven on and simply put up with the heat. (No. I’m already considering joining Jasper and lying on the tiles for half the day.)
4. Use the microwave. (Eh. I do mug cakes in the microwave now and then, when the need for baked goods is overwhelming, but I am not a fan otherwise. When I was a teen and we moved ashore after living on the boat for years, Mum embraced microwaves fervently. Fervently. I’m not sure we had anything that wasn't cooked in microwave for a good year, and the microwave cakes were a staple. They were never anywhere near as good as her oven ones, so … no.)
5. Bake in the air fryer.

 

Current baking conditions …

 

Clearly the only option was the air fryer, and I know people bake cakes in them all the time. However, I never have, despite the fact my air fryer has, among far too many other settings, a Bake option. (I have used it to bake jacket potatoes after microwaving them first. It works very well. For potatoes.)

So despite this prior success, I approached the idea of air fryer cakes with some trepidation. I did get as far as buying a little silicone pan, but it then languished in the drawer for a good few weeks while I tried to ignore it. And I’m not even sure I would have tried baking in the air fryer at all, except for the fact I wrote the Walter snippet above and immediately decided I needed to make a pineapple upside-down cake (sans glacé cherries, of course. As if).

I then collected my usual half dozen recipes, jammed them cheerily together, adjusted everything, and immediately realised I had a problem – it’s a little silicone pan. It was never going to hold an entire cake.

Fine, half it. That works.

Only … that’s really small, and the pan’s not that much smaller than the 20cm which seems to be the standard. Plus I’d have to half an egg, or use less egg, or too much, or … Two-thirds, then. That works.

Except, you know, creaming small amounts of butter and sugar is always a pain, and the butter was melting (not softening, melting) rapidly in the heat, and I wasn’t quite sure how to adjust the temperature to compensate for using the air fryer instead of the oven, and I did not realise silicone tins slow baking times down (I’ve never used them before), and I also didn’t know the air fryer browns things way before they’re cooked when baking, meaning I was opening and closing the lid all the time as I checked it, and when it was finally done getting the wobbly tin out proved interesting.

So I was fully expecting to wind up with a Jasmine-worthy bake, which would fit the scene nicely, but wouldn’t help my baked goods cravings (I would like to think my palate is slightly more refined than Walter’s), and it definitely wouldn't help with book recipes.

Only it worked. This is a delightful cake. The pineapple is drenched in a (non-alcoholic) rum and fresh ginger syrup, and more fresh ginger is baked into the cake, giving it a subtle, warm kick and offsetting the sweetness of the upside-down topping. Brown sugar adds to the caramel-y flavours, and while it’s a fairly solid cake which would lend itself beautifully to being served warm with some whipped cream, it’s also tasty and moist enough to be glorious the next day cold and unaccompanied (and, of course, the flavours develop very nicely overnight).

So I call this a win. I’m going to bake it again once it’s cool enough to use the oven (such a handy excuse!), but I feel confident that if it was this good in my first silicone-plus-air-fryer attempt, it’ll be even better made conventionally.

And if you, too, would like to bake it in an air fryer, I’ll add the notes for that below!

 

Walter’s Favourite Rum & Pineapple Upside-Down Cake

 

Ingredients:

For the topping:

• 1 x 425g / 15 oz can pineapple rings (or pieces, if you pick up the wrong one…), juice reserved
• 50g / 3 ½ Tbsp soft dark brown sugar
• 50g / 3 ½ Tbsp butter (or vegan butter)
• 100mL / ⅓ cup + 1 Tbsp spiced/dark rum
• 1 ½ tsp freshly grated ginger (adjust to taste)
• ⅓ tsp ground nutmeg
• No fake cherries! Down with fake cherries! Unless you like them, of course, then however many you need to go in the centre of the pineapple rings ;)

 

For the cake:

• 150g / ⅔ cup butter (or vegan butter)
• 110g / ½ cup + 1 Tbsp demerara sugar
• 40g / 2½ Tbsp soft dark brown sugar
• 3 large eggs (or 3 flax eggs: 3 Tbsp ground flax + 9 Tbsp water)
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 190g / 1 ½ cups + 1 Tbsp all-purpose flour (or GF blend + ½ tsp xanthan gum)
• 1 tsp baking powder
• ¼ tsp salt
• 1 ½ tsp freshly grated ginger (adjust to taste)
• ¼ tsp ground nutmeg
• reserved pineapple juice

 

Preheat your oven to 170°C fan (340°F). Grease and line a 20cm (8-inch) tin with parchment paper. (If you’re using a springform pan, you might want to place a tray below to catch any caramel drips.)

For the topping, melt butter and dark brown sugar over medium heat in a good-sized frying pan (the pineapple’s going in here too), then add the rum, ginger, and spices and let it bubble for a couple of minutes before chucking the pineapple in. Let it cook away, turning the pineapple now and then, until the fruit’s taken on a nice golden hue and the liquid’s thickened to a nice syrup.

Arrange your pineapple rings prettily in the bottom of your prepared tin (or simply tip in the pineapple pieces if you’re me), and add your cherries if you must. Top off with the rest of the syrup.

Onto the cake itself! Cream the butter and sugars until light and fluffy, then add the eggs, vanilla, and fresh ginger and mix well.

Fold in your dry ingredients to form a reasonably thick batter – it should drop gently off the spoon. If it seems a bit too thick, add some of the reserved pineapple juice.

Spoon the batter on top of the pineapple, smooth the top, and pop it in the oven. Bake for 35 – 40 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the centre comes out clean. Cool in the tin for five minutes, then tip onto a wire rack to cool (or a plate if serving warm). Remove tin and reveal its upside-down glory!

 

Glorious!
 

Notes:

• If you want to make things extra sticky and rummy, make a bit of a glaze with about 60ml / ¼ cup of the reserved pineapple juice, 25g / 2 tbsp demerara sugar, and 2 tbsp spiced rum (plus more ginger and nutmeg, if you want to up the spice kick). Pop it all in a saucepan and cook gently until nice and sticky, then once the cake’s out of the oven and upside-down stab it with a skewer a bunch of times before soothing its wounds with a generous application of rum syrup.
• My rum of choice is Captain Morgan’s non-alcoholic spiced rum, and I wasn’t sure how the syrup would cook up without alcohol in it. But it worked beautifully, and I can thoroughly recommend this as an option. Alternatively, you can also stick with just the pineapple juice, or pineapple juice and gingerale would also be lovely.
• If you also hate grating fresh ginger (so many fibres), pop it in the freezer. It keeps ages and grates super-easily on a microplane or similar.
• Adjust spices as suits your taste – dried ginger instead, or cardamom, or whatever else you prefer.
• I have not, at this stage, tested the vegan or gluten-free options, so these are purely guesswork based on what I think should work. I’m planning to test them out before I finalise the recipe for the book, but for now use at your own risk …
• I would think you could use fresh pineapple, but you might want to cook it a bit longer in the syrup to make sure it’s tender enough.
• For the air fryer, I used a 15cm silicon round tin (mould?) and reduced the recipe by roughly a third, which avoided halving eggs. Half an egg seemed like an unnecessary fuss, and it is too hot for fuss. It made for a nicely proportioned cake, but I dropped the air fryer temperature to 160C and it did take quite a while to cook. Next time I’d go for 170C, as in the conventional oven. You’ll also likely need to cover the cake’s top with foil at about the halfway point to stop it getting too brown. Look for the cake to dome and crack on top, then start checking if it’s cooked. it took about 40 minutes in my air fryer.

 

 

Now over to you, lovely people. Are you a pineapple upside-down cake fan? Far too old-fashioned for you? Glacé cherries, yes or no? And how do you bake in the summer? Share away in the comments!

(And have you got your pre-orders in for the new Beaufort yet? Head on over to discover Twist of Fête now!)

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