Sweets To The Sweet

My Beloved has a favorite cake. Pineapple upside down cake makes his day. He can't recall when he obtained this particular addiction but he's had it as long as he can remember.

When his birthday dawned without my having a single idea for presents, I decided to bake him his favorite cake. Off to the grocery store for a can of Dole pineapple rings; I already had a jar of maraschino cherries left over from the Alley Rats party.

A little online research revealed Betty Crocker's recipe for upside down cake - it looked easy and, best of all, so very apropos for such an old-fashioned dessert to be following Betty's instructions. I had to make some changes to the recipe - to substitute real butter for the margarine (that stuff always seems evil to me), to change out the brown sugar for maple sugar (which is less sweet, spoon for spoon, and adds an interesting flavor) and to bake it in a heart-shaped pan. Oh, and rather than use a cake mix, I just made a quick yellow cake batter I found on the interwebs.

The cake batter ran over and made a mess of my oven, the cake tried to stick to the pan and I had to rearrange the pineapple on top once the cake was out of the pan, but you can see from his reaction that none of that mattered. He was tickled pink with his birthday cake.

The old expression, "Sweets to the sweet" has never been more appropriate.