Pineapple Upside-down Cake

with coconut and lime sponge.

I only wanted a small dessert, for the two of us, so the sponge layer was a two-egg all-in-one mixture. As the coconut oil was fairly liquid, this could easily be made with just a spoon and bowl - no need to get out any electric appliance:

100g coconut oil
100g caster sugar
90g SR flour
50g desiccated coconut
2 large eggs
zest of 1 lime.

I used a metal non-stick pie dish, as I thought the sloping sides might look quite attractive on the inverted cake. I creamed together 50g unsalted butter, 20g golden syrup and 30g light muscovado sugar and spread this in the base of the tin to make the traditional sticky topping. On top of this I then arranged slices of cored fresh pineapple  - about 1cm thick. I put a whole slice in the centre, but had to halve the other three slices to get them to fit into the dish. Into the spaces left in the arrangement of pineapple slices I put some glacé cherry halves.

I spread the cake batter gently over the fruit, so that it wasn't dislodged, and then the cake was baked for about 35 minutes at 180C until the sponge was firm and golden. After cooling for 10 minutes the cake was turned out onto a plate to finish cooling, revealing the neat pattern of pineapple slices.

The mix of pineapple with coconut and lime gave a nice tropical flavour to this dessert, and made a pleasant change from the traditional plain sponge base. Although I used fresh pineapple, once the fruit was cooked it didn't seem very different from using tinned pineapple in the same way, so don't think that fresh fruit is really essential.

I'm entering this cake into this month's AlphaBakes Challenge (rules here), a blog challenge co-hosted by Caroline Makes and The More Than Occasional Baker. This month the challenge is hosted by Caroline, at Caroline Makes, who has chosen the letter P. In this case, P is for pineapple, obviously!