Pineapple Upside-Down Cake
WITH GLISTENING RINGS of sweet-tart pineapple and ruby pops of maraschino cherries adorning a buttery, tender yellow cake, the pineapple upside-down cake is one of America’s most iconic desserts. At its most basic, the dessert is a stir-together yellow cake baked atop butter, brown sugar, canned pineapple rings, and jarred cherries and then inverted once baked so the fruit is on top.
My colleagues and I sampled five recipes for this cake, and we were surprised to find that while the cakes looked great, they simply weren’t as delicious or as special as they should have been. To start, the cakes themselves didn’t have pineapple flavor, and the toppings had metallic notes from the canned fruit. The versions we tried with chunks of
