Pineapple Upside Down Rum Cake

A couple months ago I got on a kick of making cakes with spiced rum after my roommate brought that home instead of regular rum.  While the standard recipes were good, I knew I could continue to improve the cake with variations. I wanted to make a pina-colada cake, but since my roommate is allergic to coconut, I opted to try the pineapple upside down version and pulled out the maraschino cherries.

To date it is my favorite of the multiple variations.

 

Cake:

1 box French vanilla cake mix

1 box (4 serving) vanilla instant pudding

½ cup liquid drained off pineapple (no sugar added preferably)

½ cup spiced rum

½ cup oil (I use olive)

4 eggs

Pineapple chunks or rounds

Maraschino cherries

 

Glaze

¼ cup butter

½ cup sugar

¼ cup water

¼ cup spiced rum

 

 

Preheat oven to 325°. In a large bowl, combine cake mix, pudding mix, water, oil, eggs, rum, and allspice. Beat until combined. Grease and flour a Bundt pan. Spread pineapple and maraschino cherries around the bottom then pour in the batter. Bake for 50-60 minutes.

When the cake comes out of the oven, leave in pan. Boil butter, sugar, and drained pineapple juice, glaze ingredients for 5 minutes, stirring constantly. Remove from heat and stir in spiced rum.

With the cake still in the pan, poke holes in the cake – I use a chopstick. Pour hot glaze over the cake. Allow the glaze to soak into the cake before turning it out onto a plate (about 5 minutes).

 

Spiced Rum Cake

In the midst of a cooking frenzy, I asked my roommate to run to the liquor store to pick up some rum for a particular drink I was going to make. He called from the store and asked what kind; I naively replied, “any.”

He came home with spiced rum. Not at all anything I could use in the planned drink. So I had to come up with something to use that rum –I am too cheap to waste things. It had been a while since I made a cake, so I decided to investigate recipes for a spiced rum cake. The internet and my cookbooks offered myriad suggestions, but I opted for something simple and quick.

 Version one was good, but I knew I could improve on it (it left off the amount of spiced rum to put in the glaze). The texture and flavor of the cake lacked what I expect from a cake, so I tried again with my own adjustments. Version two came out much better.

 

The recipe is quite simple:

Cake:

1 box white cake mix

1 box (4 serving) vanilla instant pudding

½ cup water

½ cup spiced rum

½ cup oil (I use olive)

4 eggs

1 tsp ground allspice

½ cup chopped or slivered nuts

 

Glaze

¼ cup butter

½ cup sugar

¼ cup water

¼ cup spiced rum

dash allspice

 

Preheat oven to 325°. In a large bowl, combine cake mix, pudding mix, water, oil, eggs, rum, and allspice. Beat until combined. Grease and flour a bundt pan. Spread nuts around the bottom then pour in the batter. Bake for 50-60 minutes.

 

When the cake comes out of the oven, leave in pan. Boil butter, sugar, water, and allspice glaze ingredients for 5 minutes, stirring constantly. Remove from heat and stir in spiced rum.

 

With the cake still in the pan, poke holes in the cake – I use a chopstick. Pour hot glaze over the cake. Allow the glaze to soak into the cake before turning it out onto a plate (about 5 minutes).

 

No Stir Fruit Cobbler

Every once in a while I get a craving for something sweet. When I want something that I can whip up quickly with any variety of variation, I make my No-Stir Fruit Cobbler. The cobbler offers a variation of a cake cobbler rather than a pie-crust type cobbler. Do not count on it being low fat or low calorie. Do count on it being delicious.

 

½ C butter (use REAL butter)

1 C sugar

1 C flour (I have started using ½ C white, ½ C whole wheat especially with fruits that let me use cinnamon as a spice)
1 ½ tsp baking powder

Dash salt

¾ C milk (I often use half-and-half)

3 C fruit canned or fresh (I prefer frozen, thought it adds to cooking time)

1 C sugar

Other spices as appropriate for the fruit selected

 

Preheat oven to 325°. Melt the butter in a Pyrex baking dish (8 X 12). While the butter is melting, combine flour, sugar, salt, baking powder (optional spices) and milk. Pour this mixture over the melted butter. Do NOT Stir! Spread the fruit over the batter mixture. Do NOT Stir! Sprinkle 1 cup sugar over fruit (I sometimes mix with a spice appropriate for the fruit). Bake at 325° for 50 minutes or until brown and bubbly. If using frozen fruit, it often takes an additional 20 (30-40 in a toaster oven) minutes of baking time.

The spices I use include cinnamon, apple pie spice, ground mustard, cayenne pepper, and allspice. It simply depends on what works best with the fruit I’m using. The cayenne pepper, just a dash, works GREAT with peaches and the ground mustard works really well with apples. When using apple, I sometimes sprinkle a little sharp cheddar cheese in the batter.

 

Some of my favorite fruits include peaches and blueberries (frozen), apple (sliced with my mandolin), and blackberries (fresh or frozen).

 

Over the years there the cobbler has become one of my most requested desserts, next to the Mayonnaise Chocolate Cake (just trust me, it’s wonderful).