Upside-Down Uprising

What a stellar statistical circumnavigation of bake-off winners past, Rachel! You have such a way with numerals.

We inhabitants at the red castle have been preoccupied with a new neighbor, who is still adjusting to his home and scratching post/box. St. George (the mouse-slayer) is not inspiring us in a culinary fashion, as his palate favors meaty-but-odd variations on brown, in "wet" and dry variety. Now that the mice have returned, we can assume, to hiding in the walls and feasting on the fall-out shelter crackers, we can again face our pantries courageously.

Last Sunday, I shared an old favorite and considered ways to fashion him for the modern age: pineapple upside-down cake. Not that I don't love him just the way he is, but he's just so retro. So McCarthy-era conscious of trying to please and fit in. Nothing untoward here, just us canned, culturally bland chunks. Dear Mr. Upside, let's get down. You are soaked with sweet. You are weighty in that ponderous Brezhnev/Yeltsin way.

While I like the density of the cake (it contains much less egg and much less flour than the standard ratio), it is one-dimensional. It could be enriched with extra yolks, or officially soaked with fruit juice (and rum?) after baking. The one standard that must be perfected is the crispy caramel topping that goes into the pan first. I let the brown sugar and butter commingle, slowly and luxuriantly bubbling, for a few minutes, but cut down the over-all baking time as the cake appeared to be brown about 15 minutes early. A fatal error, as far as the caramel was concerned. Everything tasted great, but was of mushier-than-desired consistency.

To make Mr. Upside into a Pils winner, we will have to revolutionize. I call for perestroika: abandon your out of date identity, sir! I'm imagining cardamom, cloves, a merangue topping -- or rather, bottoming, once flipped, and of course fresh pineapple, cut into practicable bite-size triangles -- a banishment of the alien-rounded donuts from the can. Are you with me, comrades?