I baked my first cake from scratch last Thursday… A Pineapple upside down cake using Dick DeBartolo’s recipe. It turned out on the chewy side. I think I over-stirred it, or perhaps I didn’t get it in the oven quick enough after putting the baking powder in. I love the caramelized sugar on the bottom of it. An using strawberry jam instead of the candied cherries tastes a lot better to me.
Cooking cakes from scratch is quite a bit simpler than I thought it would be. Similar to cooking my favorite brownie recipe from scratch. It’s just a matter of getting everything together in the correct order . The tricky part of this was the room temperature butter. I’ve only had to deal with that when making pie crusts, and that was several years ago. I ended up mashing the butter up with a fork then mixing it into the eggs…. After all it wasn’t the time to be googleing the correct way to combine it in.
I’ve made pineapple upsidedown cakes before so the topping, or bottom, wasn’t a big deal. The jam was actually quicker than fishing cherries out of the jar, and added plus. Then I scooped the cake batter on top, like Dick recommended. Even though the pineapple rings where packed in tight, They still tried to move around a bit.
It was fun! I think I may try a chocolate cake from scratch next. I’m trying to move away from cake mix because the kind that I used to use was full of Hydrogenated oils. Not good for you, no matter how good it tastes. It didn’t take me any longer to make the cake from scratch, than it does to make one from a mix. Which saving time was the whole point in using the mix, for me, in the first place.
On to more cooking experiments in the future… Right after we finish this cake though 
