If you have checked me out recently on Instagram, you may have noticed that LongJohn and I just spent the last three weeks hanging out with my parents in Florida, where we both got a nice tan and the kid grew about four inches.
I didn’t do too much cooking while I was there, but I did make one or two things, and here’s one of them. My dad was trying to clear out the pantry in preparation for their trip back to the True North, so in my efforts to help him get rid of a few things, I came up with this puppy. It’s a good cake for the winter or the summer (I think).
Preheat your oven to 350°F and spray or butter an 8″ x 8″ glass baking dish. Might as well polish off some of the brownies-from-a-box you made the day before. Gotta keep cleaning out that cupboard, right?
Grab some butter (oh, the land where butter is always at a spreadable temperature!) and melt 3 tablespoons of it.
Grab a small bowl and tip in 3/4 cup flour, 1/2 cup oats, and 1 teaspoon baking powder. Then assemble the rest of your stuff: 1/4 cup brown sugar, 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon, 1/4 teaspoon ground ginger, a pinch ground cloves, 1/3 cup molasses, 1 egg, and of course your 3 tablespoons melted butter. You’ll see here as well about 1-ish cup fresh (not frozen) blueberries. If you use frozen blueberries the juice from the broken blueberries will get all through the batter and alter the molasses taste. It might also take longer to cook.
Take all the stuff that isn’t in a bowl with oats or is blueberries and beat that together.
Take the blueberries and tip them in the bowl with the oats and flour and stir that a bit. Coating the blueberries in flour prevents them all from sinking to the bottom of the baking dish.
Plop the oats, flour, and blueberries into the molasses mix and stir until smooth(ish).
Spoon that into your prepared dish and bake for 25-35 minutes until a toothpick inserted in the centre comes out clean. This timing will really depend on how thick the glass on your dish is. I cooked this in a convection toaster oven which I think is slightly hotter than it says it is, and so it was done in 25 minutes. Put the cake, still in the dish, on a wire rack to cool completely.
Now if you want to make it fancy, grab yourself a nice ripe whole pineapple. The pineapple trivet is optional.
Cut the top and bottom of the pineapple up and then slice off the skin.
Cut the pineapple into quarters along its core, and slice off the core from the quarters.
Cut each quarter lengthwise into three pieces. Too complicated? Just cut it up any way you would like. I’m not your mother.
Coat each one of the pineapple pieces in granulated sugar.
Set those aside for a minute.
In a large skillet or frying pan (or saucepan, whichever is your biggest), melt another 3 tablespoons butter.
Cook all the slices of pineapple in the skillet on medium heat until they’re cooked through and kind of shrunken, about 8-10 minutes. If you don’t have room to cook them all in the pan at once, wait until some of them shrink before adding a few more slices.
Remove from pan and set on serving plate. They will start to ooze thick sugary juice.
Add 3 tablespoons water to the butter and sugar in pan and let it thicken, stirring, JUST until it starts to brown then remove immediately from the heat. It will continue to brown as you stir, off the heat.
Drizzle that over the pineapple.
You can serve them hot but if you leave the caramel on the pineapple as it cools it will slowly dissolve back into the juice, leaving a nice sauce you can spoon over the pineapple and the square when you serve it.
Enjoy!
Ali Does It Herself 