pineapple upside down cake

This always seems to me like a very 80s thing, and indeed I got the recipe from a cookbook printed in 1977 (The Dairy Book of Home Cooking).

We had half a pineapple left from making pork and pineapple, and decided an upside down cake would be a good thing to do with it.  It was already chopped up, and I decided against the glace cherries too, but it was jolly nice nonetheless.

Take 2oz of soft brown sugar and 2oz butter, and melt together in a pan.  Tip the resultant gloop into the bottom of a greased, 20cm round cake tin.  Put the pineapple on top.

Put 8oz self raising flour, 1 tsp of vanilla essence, 2 eggs, 4oz butter and 4oz caster sugar into the food processor and blitz.  I guess you could use a food mixer - cream butter and sugar, add eggs and vanilla essence, fold in flour.

Transfer it to the cake tin, bake at 180/gas 4 for about 1hr 10 minutes.

Very retro :)

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when the going gets tough

The tough get … cooking.

perlmonger has been up to his eyes today configuring servers; that’s not something that I can really help with, so I had a cooking frenzy.

I made

• Some soda bread for lunch - my Irish grandmother made a loaf of this every morning, and it’s delicious. I actually use a mix of plain flour, strong white, and wholemeal. Fab - I ate mine with some smoked cheddar, and red pepper relish. And now I want to make chutney.
• I cooked up half a huge gammon - I buy these from Costco, at about £18 a time. Half went in the freezer uncooked, and the other half was cooked up in my splendid new cast iron cauldron (conveyed from Forn Parts by that nice ccomley, cos they’re much cheaper there). It’s so huge we had to rearrange the kitchen to find somewhere to keep it, and I can’t actually lift it when it’s full, but ne’er mind - it is a splendid cooking recepticule. This (half) gammon was cooked with a quartered onion, two star anise and a slosh of maple syrup, and very nice it is too.
• Next up was a piece of top side, supplied by that nice Mr Rawlings. It was too small to roast, so I did it innapot, very slowly, and it’s nearly ready to eat. I put the potatoes in with it today for a change.
• Then a huge pot of soup was constructed for next week’s lunches - I chopped carrots, celery, leeks and courgettes, sweated them down in some olive oil, and added lentils and a carton of passata (something no larder should be without). Once the gammon was cooked, I stole most of the ham stock and bunged it in the soup pan. It will be gorgeous. I hope.

P is now requesting bananananana muffins, but I think I might be too tired. I’ll see.

[edit] Oh yes - I took the half of fresh pineapple that was left, liquidised it, and cooked it down with a little sugar and some cornflour. It’s gone in the freezer as a cheesecake topping or summat similar.

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