pineapple-coconut upside-down cake with ginger

I'm on a pineapple upside-down cake kick. A couple weeks ago I found a great recipe for the standard, retro-style cake. You know, the kind your mom made, studded with sweet maraschino cherries placed in the center of canned pineapple slices to top the cake. It was really good, even though the center didn't bake all the way through (we just ate around it). The cake was just as I remembered it growing up and and was what I was craving that day.

Today, I tried a more modern version. I'm a big fan of crystallized ginger and coconut goes beautifully with pineapple. So for this cake, the topping consisted of fresh pineapple, minced candied ginger, brown sugar and a generous splash of dark rum.

For the cake, I subbed in coconut milk and added a little coconut extract for good measure. The whole thing baked up in my handy dandy cast iron skillet. And there were no problems inverting it onto the cake stand. Everything came out of the pan perfectly.

Since it was just Abby and me for dinner tonight we had it all to ourselves. We enjoyed a wonderful meal of barbecued chicken, caprese salad and farm-fresh sweet corn on-the-cob, which we finished off with a big slice of this cake. The cake was delicious. Now we're vegetating in front of the tube to digest it all!

If you want the recipe for the newfangled version of pineapple upside-down cake, post a comment or send me an email.