We both love this cake and it has turned into the standard birthday cake for us. It helps that we don't need to ice it and so its EZ! I have read some recipes that don't actually make a caramel in the first step, I suspect these are the ones that look very white in the end, I prefer this "old-fashioned" one that we found on simplyrecipes.com.
Caramel Topping ingredients:
- 1 cup of firmly packed dark brown sugar
- 1/2 cup (113g) unsalted butter
- 1 can of pineapple slices
Cake ingredients:
- 1 1/2 cups all purpose flour
- 6 Tbsp cake flour
- 6 Tbsp of ground almonds (from about 2 oz of whole almonds)
- 3/4 teaspoon baking powder
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
- 1 3/4 cups of sugar
- 1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter at room temperature
- 4 eggs
- 3/4 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 3/4 cup sour cream
Steps
- Preheat oven to 325 °F/165 °C.
- Make the caramel topping. Take brown sugar and butter and combine and melt in a saucepan on medium heat until sugar dissolves and the mixture is bubbly, this usually takes us about 10 minutes on medium with slightly cooler than RT butter. The mixture gets pretty frothy after the sugar melts, so we just gently swirl it to make sure the butter and sugar are combined. Pour mixture into a 10 inch diameter stick-free cake pan with 2 inch high sides. We used a spring form, these leak. Boo.
- Arrange pineapple slices in a single layer on top of the caramel mixture.
- Whisk the flours, ground almonds, baking powder, and salt in a large mixing bowl. In a separate bowl, use an electric whisk to beat the sugar and butter together until light. Add eggs one at a time, beating between each addition. Whisk in the vanilla. Add half the dry ingredients then half the sour cream then the rest of the dry ingredients and the rest of the sour cream, whisking in between each.
- Pour the cake batter over the caramel and pineapple slices
- Bake cake until tester inserted into the center comes out clean, about 1 hour to 1 hour 15 minutes (we sometimes have to microwave the cake in the end to get it firm, sometimes the center never gets completely firm, I suspect because of the juice from the pineapple). Cool cake in pan on a rack for 10 minutes. Turn cake out onto a platter. Serve warm or at room temperature. (We mos def prefer warm!)
