Y’know, I have no idea what a “buckle” is, other than the metal object one uses to attach things with straps. But it appears to be some kind of American dessert-like object resembling a tall clafoutis, so I’m going to roll with it. I got this recipe from Martha Stewart. She used mangoes, but lacking those (and unwilling to pay the $3 each price tag on them, thanks Newfoundland), I used some oranges that had seen better days and I didn’t want to waste them.
Preheat your oven to 350°F and grab yourself a 2-quart baking dish. I’m not sure, having never made this before, if the dish should be wide and shallow or narrow and deep (like this one), but I worked with what I had. Use some butter to grease the sides and bottom of the dish. There are definite benefits to butter that comes in sticks for this.
Peel and core a small pineapple and cut it into smallish chunks. I did this a few days ago and discovered that despite the aroma coming from the whole fruit, the flavour was rather disappointing — hence this dessert. I did the same thing with 4 small navel oranges that were nearing the end of their days. I cut off the peel with a knife and also cut out the pith from the centre, then cut the orange into eighths.
Toss those into a container and sprinkle with 2 tablespoons brown sugar. Toss them to coat in the sugar and leave them aside for now.
In a small bowl, whisk together 3/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons all-purpose flour, 1 teaspoon cinnamon, 1/4 teaspoon baking soda and a pinch of salt. Set that aside for the nonce.
In the bowl of a mixer, beat together 1/2 cup unsalted butter (equivalent to 1 stick) and 1/2 cup granulated sugar.
Keep going until it’s super fluffy.
Add in 2 eggs, one at a time, beating in between additions until fully incorporated. Then drop in 1 teaspoon vanilla. As you can see, I did not measure this. And I don’t care.
Slowly add in your flour and mix all together.
Dump all but about 1 cup of your fruit into the batter and fold it all around until it’s fully mixed. Pour the fruit and batter into your dish and add the remaining fruit on top.
Bake for 45-50 minutes, until fluffy and golden brown on top. I was so annoyed with the fact that my Bookmark Brownies weren’t cutting properly that I may have forgotten to set the timer for this and ended up winging it.
Scoop some out and serve warm with a bit of whipped cream. TASTY!
The best part about this was heating up a scoop of this the next day for breakfast and topping it with my favourite yogurt. I highly recommend that.
This cake is my childhood. Or at least the part of my childhood where I didn’t think I was allergic to pineapple. Turns out it’s just the No Name brand of pineapple that makes me throw up. Who knew?
My mother has recently discovered the ease of email (crazy, I know, but we also bought our first touch-tone phone in 1991), so this recipe came to me over the interweb. The original recipe, for an 8″ cake pan, comes from a Fanny Merritt Farmer cookbook dating back a few decades, but my mother has modified it for the skillet, adding a bit more flour, sugar, and butter as appropriate. I get my lack of standardized measurements from her. Here we go.
Melt, in your skillet, between 1/4 and 1/2 cup butter. The butter should be liquid, but not boiling hot. Burns do not make for enjoyment in baking. I suggest you remove it from the heat at this time and put it on a trivet on your counter. More elbow room, for me at least.
Spread 1 cup brown sugar evenly over the butter mixture, covering the bottom of the pan. Add more if you like. It’s going to melt with the butter and turn to caramel, and it will mix with the pineapple juice and the cherry juice and it will all be so incredibly incredible. 
Drain a can of pineapple rings (or use a 
If you wish, you can put maraschino cherries in all the little empty spaces, especially in the centre of the rings. I of course do so wish.
Sift together 1 1/2 to 2 cups flour (depending on the size of your skillet) with 2 tsp baking powder and 1/2 cup granulated sugar. In another bowl, mix together 1 egg and 1/2 cup milk and add to the flour mixture. The batter will be very dense, so you can add more milk to make it more spreadable. I ended up adding about an extra 1/2 cup of milk to my 2 cups of flour. Feel free to experiment with the batter. My mother says she sometimes adds grated orange peel to it.
Carefully spread the batter in a thin layer on top of the pineapple in the skillet. You’ll notice that the batter doesn’t spread all the way across. There will be gaps and even holes through which you can see the pineapple stuff. That is okay, as it will expand while it cooks. And it will pull away from the sides, anyway, as the butter starts to bubble up.
Bake for 35 minutes or until the top is brown and crusty. If you are using a skillet this will likely take less time because the skillet is already warm and the batter is stretched across a bigger surface. For me this took about 30 minutes.
Carefully flip upside down onto a serving plate. Sometimes it’s easier to put the plate on first, then flip it. My mother has this old-fashioned brown one that I covet because it is the exact size of the skillet, but I made do with this cheese plate instead, which is why the melted sugar oozed everywhere. Some stuff may still be stuck in the pan, but because your now caramelized brown sugar is still liquid you can glue it all back into place before it cools. Make sure to get all the good stuff out of the pan before it cools completely or you will never get it out.
This little hummer (to channel my dad) is on page 210 of 
We made this recipe precisely because we had exactly those ingredients in our fridge and we needed to use them up. And I got to use my new scale on this recipe, too, which was a plus.
Cut one small red onion into thin slices (we had half, so were content with that). Seed a red pepper (see my how-to on 
While you’re in the process of seeding, why don’t you take the seeds out of two plum tomatoes (we used roma) and cut them into wedges as well? As a finishing touch, cut 115g/4oz of pineapple into chunks (more if you like the stuff, see my how-to on 
In a small bowl, mix together one tablespoon brown sugar with two tablespoons fish sauce and some ground black pepper.
Heat two tablespoons oil in a wok or large frying pan. Drop in four cloves of garlic, thinly sliced (or, if you are us, 4 spoonfuls of garlic in a jar). Cook over medium heat until golden, then add the pork and stir-fry for four or five minutes. Slide in the onion slices and toss.
Add your fish sauce mixture and toss over the heat for three or four more minutes.
I know what you’re thinking. A pineapple corer is some elaborate gadget that you don’t really need.
