It was requested that I bring a dessert for a family gathering last weekend (as usual), and I decided to do something a little different.

Normally, I’d have found some cookies, bars or maybe cupcakes – but I had a hankering for a good old-fashioned pineapple upside-down cake.  I’ve never made one, so dug through recipes and put one together.

Don’t let the fruit fool you: this is not a healthy dessert.  But it is damn good.  Moist, sweet and unbelievably delicious.

Here’s what I think made this cake awesome, instead of just good:

• I used the pineapple juice instead of water in the cake mix.
• I used two entire sticks of butter – one in the mix, one for the topping.
• I added crushed pineapple to the rings and topping, which added moisture and more sugary goodness.

First things first:  melt a stick of butter and then mix in a cup of brown sugar.  Pour-slash-spread that mixture in the bottom of a 9 x 13″ baking pan.  Lay your rings of pineapple along the bottom.  I add crushed pineapple to the ‘open’ areas too.  Put cute little Maraschino cherries in the middle of each ring.

Mmmmm. Look at all that butter.

Mix up the rest of the ingredients in your stand mixer.  It’ll be thick and creamy.  Pour it into the pan, and spread evenly.

It’s seriously thick and there is seriously a lot of butter.  This scared me, but rest assured: it’s all necessary.

Bake according to the directions on your cake mix.  For me, that meant roughly 28 minutes.

Pull it out of the oven and let it cool down for 10-15 minutes.

Now here’s the fun part:  find a platter that’s bigger than the cake. I don’t happen to own one – but I didn’t know that until we got to this point.  A baking sheet would work;  a baking sheet coated with pretty parchment paper or even decorative foil would be awesome.

But alas, I didn’t think of these things when I needed to flip my cake.  Instead, I found a bigger baking pan (a 10″ x 14″) and tried to flip it into that.  The hot, sticky, cake.

Yeah.

Keep in mind:  the cake will stay where it lands.  So if you’re trying to hold on to a just-out-of-the-oven glass baking pan and keep it centered on another heavier glass baking pan and you’re trying to flip it really fast because you don’t want to lose any of that buttery, sugary sweetness that’s on the bottom … well.  Just be warned.  That cake will stay where it lands, even if that means it’s half in, half out of the “new” pan.  No spatula will lift the entire cake, and it won’t just “slide” over to center itself in the pan.

At least it tasted amazing, even if it didn’t look all that great.  Now I know.