Recipe Roulette Ep. 2: Cooking Pineapple Upside Down Cake from This Odd Cookbook

Today I’m testing a recipe from a mysterious, uncredited cookbook — starting with a classic pineapple upside down cake. Welcome to Recipe Roulette, where I let the book decide what I cook.

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Hello everybody and welcome back to Dollar Tree Dinners. On Thursdays, I play a game called Recipe Roulette where I try a random recipe from a cookbook and we see if it’s good or not. For the month of July, I am focusing on this cookbook. This is nostalgic recipes from the ‘ 50s,60s,7s, and 80s. Last week was the first week I tried a recipe from this cookbook, and I had a few deductions about this cookbook, and several of you had similar theories that I had. This cookbook has no credited author or any sources cited whatsoever. And it also credits all of the photos to shutter stock. So that means that all of the pictures in this book are just stock images. My theory and a lot of you guys’ theory as well is that this cookbook may be entirely written by AI. But ultimately that is just a theory. So we are trying some recipes out of this cookbook. See if they look like their picture. See if they taste good. And ultimately, I think at the end of this, I’ll be able to tell you whether or not I think this is a good cookbook or not. Before we pick our random recipe for the day, I thought I’d just give you like a quick overview of this cookbook. So, this is what I mean. This is by Publications International Limited. And here’s the entire forward. This was published in 2023. It lists the publication, art throughout, and photograph on the front cover is copyright toshtock.com. It lists all of the different kind of recipes that are featured. And that’s pretty much it. It goes straight into the recipes. It tells you what decade the recipe is from. Like this one says it’s a recipe from the 1950s. But again, there’s no information about where these recipes came from, where this data came from or anything like that. The photos are absolutely stunning, but they are just stock photos. So that means that this recipe might not look like this. So I just use a random number generator on my phone to pick a random recipe. And there are I think I said 190 there are 192 pages in this cookbook. So I’m just going to plug in 192. Let’s generate. and it picked 155. So, let’s see what recipe is on page 155 and we will find out together. 134. Here we go. 155 pineapple upside down cake recipe from the 1950s. Again, gorgeous photo. I think interestingly right off my first glance, there are a couple things that stick out to me. The first is that this calls for fresh pineapple, not canned pineapple, although it does say you can substitute canned pineapple rings. And also, the cake recipe calls for buttermilk. That’s kind of unique. So, I guess today we’re making pineapple upside down cake. As usual, I might not have all of the ingredients to make this cake, but we’ll go through and see what I do have, what I need to buy, and then we’ll get into making it. I do have brown sugar. I have allpurpose flour. I have baking powder and regular granulated sugar. I also have butter. And surprisingly, I do have marishino cherries. I bought these when I did the crumble hot fudge sundae brownies. Um, so I still have some of those left. salt, vanilla, I use imitation vanilla just from Dollar Tree, and one egg, which I definitely have. So, it looks like the only things I need to pick up are pineapple. I am going to use canned pineapple just because it’s easier, and it says I can. I’m going to buy baking soda because I actually don’t keep baking soda on hand, and I need to pick up buttermilk. But those are the only three things I need to make this recipe. However, as many of you guys mention from time to time, a good substitute for buttermilk is milk and lemon juice. And I do have both of those ingredients. So, I am not going to be buying buttermilk. We’re going to be testing out a buttermilk substitute. So, in this instance, the purpose that buttermilk serves is flavor, of course, but this recipe calls for baking soda. And baking soda needs an acid to be activated. And buttermilk is that acid. So, by substituting the buttermilk for milk mixed with lemon juice, we get that same acidity to activate that baking soda without the need to purchase an additional ingredient. Cuz the primary purpose is to try this recipe, but I also like to show you guys how to adapt recipes to ingredients you already have when you’re reading a recipe and trying it for the first time. So, let’s grab one cup of whole milk. Any milk really works for this, but generally speaking, whole milk is recommended. And to that, we’re going to add one tablespoon of lemon juice. And we’re just going to let that set aside for about 10 to 15 minutes while we prep the rest of our ingredients. All right. Then it says to preheat the oven to 350. I’ve got that going. Spray a 9 in round baking pan with non-stick spray. The next step is if you have pineapple to carve the pineapple and cut it into slices. But I have canned, so we can skip that. I would rather buy canned pineapple than have to worry about whether the pineapple I bought is ripe or not. So that’s just easiest for me cuz I always have really bad luck with pineapples. The next step is also kind of unique cuz it calls for us to make the sauce in a saucepan. Typically, when I’ve made pineapple upside down cake, I’ve just put melted butter and brown sugar in the bottom of my cake dish, but this one says to mix the butter and brown sugar in a saucepan and let it melt down. I do feel like that’s kind of dirtying a pot unnecessarily, but I’m going to go ahead and do it anyways. So, 1/4 cup of butter, 1/2 cup of brown sugar. That only took a couple of minutes, but now we’ve got a melted and smooth kind of caramel mixture. We’re going to pour that into the bottom of our cake pan. This is actually a pie pan, but don’t tell anybody. I don’t have a cake pan. I couldn’t find one. So, I’m still on the fence about whether that whole step was kind of unnecessary or whether I could have just, you know, put the brown sugar and butter in the bottom of the pan. But once we make the cake, I’ll be able to tell if there’s a difference. Arrange the pineapple slices in pan. Place some cherries in centers of pineapple. Reserve remaining pineapple for another use. They do have this kind of like I’m kind of going based on the picture here. They do have them kind of overlapping a bit. So, it looks like they have six slices around the edge and then one in the middle. And then we’re going to add our cherries. Mine have stems, so I’m just going to go ahead and pop the stems out before I put them in the baking pan. We have the kids this week and I don’t know if they’ve ever had a pineapple upside down cake, so this will be fun to figure out if they like it as well. Bottom layer done. Now we get to prep the cake. So next step is our dry ingredients. So it says whisk flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. Two cups of flour. Two teaspoon of baking powder. It’s been a while since I baked a cake. This is actually kind of fun. It’s been a while since I baked a cake that wasn’t from a mix, I should say. Half a teaspoon of baking soda. Half a teaspoon of salt. And give that a whisk. kind of anecdotal, but this does kind of feel like an old-fashioned style cake. You know, even calling for things like an electric mixer instead of stand mixer. So, we’re supposed to cream one stick of butter softened. So, one cup of granulated sugar and let’s whip those together. Then we’re going to add in one egg and a teaspoon of vanilla. And let’s get those mixed to combine as well. And then last step is add flour mixture alternately with buttermilk, mixing on low speed just until blended after each addition. Now, it doesn’t specify this, but I do know you’re supposed to start with dry. So, about a third of the dry. And we’re doing instead of buttermilk, we’re doing our Oops. Hold on. Instead of buttermilk, we’re doing our milk and lemon juice mixture. So, let’s add in half of that. Another third of our dry. This cake comes together really quick. I do appreciate that. The other half of our milk and lemon mix and the last bit of our dry. There we go. Scrape down the sides to make sure everything is incorporated. All right. Then we’re going to pour our prepared cake batter over our pineapple. All right. Going to spread that out. And then that is going to go in a 350°ree oven for 1 hour. So here’s the cake after 1 hour. It looks a little lighter on camera than it does in person. It’s a little darker than I would typically go for for a cake, but we’re going to turn it out and see how it looks. It has been cooling. It says to cool it for about 10 minutes before inverting it. Moment of truth. Let’s flip this out and see if it releases. Oh, yeah. It did. It did. All right. Ready? Oh, we lost some pineapples. Oh, no. Okay. Well, that didn’t quite turn out. Some of the pineapples are stuck. I wonder if that has to do with how we made the sauce in a saucepan. I should just be able to kind of hopefully repair that that one. Um, really optimistic about how this was going. I’m also missing Oh, I was going to say I’m also missing a cherry, but no, I’m not. Okay. I wonder if I would have had better results if I had just flipped it immediately after taking out the oven and not waiting the 10 minutes. But we fixed it and it looks good otherwise. Lost a little bit of the cake to this side, but the top of it looks good. Pineapple upside down cake I think is very forgiving. So this is our finished cake compared to the stock image. I do think they kind of look the same. We’ve got this really dark kind of saucy caramel around the edges. Our pineapples look like they got some glaze on them as well. I don’t know why this pineapple here didn’t get any color on it, but all of the rest of them look really great. So, we do look pretty close to our stock image. I’m going to cut it into slices like this around the pineapple so that each slice gets like a full chunk of pineapple. I think that’s a really solid way to cut that. And that’s our cake. Still hot and steamy. Has not cooled yet. I feel like pineapple upside down cake is really meant to be eaten warm. The cake itself does appear to have a really nice crumb. It’s a little bit of a denser texture, but moment of truth. Let’s give it a taste. So, this is pineapple upside down cake from a cookbook with no author, no cited sources in all stock photography. That’s interesting. I don’t know what to think of this. I kind of need to break this down into a few different components, but let’s start with the cake itself. It’s not very sweet despite the fact that it had an entire cup of sugar in it. Um, it doesn’t really taste like much. It tastes like pound cake. It’s got a very similar texture to pound cake. The dense crumb. It’s a little bit crumbly, but what’s most pound cake like is the bottom of it where it baked and it got super brown and crispy. I’m not sure if you guys can hear that, but the bottom of the cake very firm, very crisp. The inside of the cake, very dense, not very sweet, very much like a pound cake. That’s unlike most pineapple upside down cakes that I’ve had, which are more like a sponge cake or just your traditional kind of vanilla cake. Now, there is the part of the cake that’s been really heavily soaked in that caramel sauce that we made, and that is divine. It is so scrumptious. It is moist. It’s tender. So, that’s like the top third of the cake. Absolutely delicious. And then the third part about it is the pineapple topper. And it just kind of leaves me wanting more pineapple. And I think that this is where like my tweaks would come in is that instead of buttermilk or like the lemon milk mixture that we made, I would do canned pineapple juice. Based on the fact that they wrote this using a fresh pineapple instead of canned pineapple, I can see why they wouldn’t just assume that you have pineapple juice. But if you’re substituting But if you’re substituting the fresh pineapple for canned pineapple, you have all this delicious pineapple juice and you could really use that to your advantage to give the cake base more of a rich pineapple flavor. And the pineapple juice itself is still quite acidic. So it would work as a substitute for the buttermilk without having to purchase or use an additional ingredient. So I would say that we are two for two on recipes that are good. They are palatable, but they’re not as good as some other recipes. I do kind of feel like the recipes in this book are a little on the generic side. So, I still have yet to make a determination on whether I think this is a good cookbook or not. I think it’s a good beginner friendly cookbook, at least. I hope you guys enjoyed today’s episode. I hope you’re having a fantastic day. I know I skipped yesterday, which was Wednesday. I’m also going to have to skip tomorrow, which is Friday. We are going out of town this weekend to visit some family. And I would rather spend the time that I have between now and then getting ready for next week’s videos, especially the rotisserie chicken series because I’m having a lot of fun with that one. And I do have another series of recipes planned using a single rotisserie chicken. So again, no video on Friday. That’s so I can try to get ahead a little bit and get Monday’s video out on time. I hope you guys are having a fantastic day and I’ll see you again on