pineapple upside down cake

Sometimes there’s nothing like the simplicity of a good old-fashioned “comfort” dessert like pineapple upside down cake and that’s all it takes to make your day. I reduced the sugar in the cake itself and in the topping as well as we’ve been tying our best to limit our sugar intake these days. I found out that some recipes can sometimes be overloaded with sugar and reducing it doesn’t seem to affect the end result at all. The sugar reduction, I must say, worked well for this kind of cake. Delicate chiffon cakes may not take it too well though. I was reading a little bit about the history of pineapple upside down cake. It was a winning recipe back in the early 1900’s. Here’s an interesting trivia about it from www.foodreference.com :
“ The term 'upside down cake' wasn't used very much before the middle of the 19th century, but the style of baking probably dates back much further, probably to the Middle Ages. The early recipes for fruit upside down cakes were made in cast iron skillets on top of the stove. The classic American 'Pineapple Upside Down Cake' dates to sometime after 1903, when Jim Dole invented canned pineapple. The Hawaiin Pineapple Co. (now Dole Pineapple) held a pineapple recipe contest in 1925, with judges from Fannie Farmer's School, Good Housekeeping and McCall's magazine on the judging panel. The 100 winning recipes would be published in a cookbook the following year. Over 60,000 recipes were sent in, and 2,500 of them were for Pineapple Upside Down Cake. So it is obvious that between 1903 when canned pineapple was first available, and 1925 when the contest was held, Pineapple Upside Down Cake had become a very popular item. The Hawaiin Pineapple Company ran an ad campaign in 1926 based on the fact that so many recipes for the cake had been submitted, naturally making the Pineapple Upside Down Cake even more popular.”
The recipe I used to make my version of this cake came from an issue of Everyday Food magazine. It was actually for a pear upside down cake. I run out of maraschino cherries so I tried using some raspberry jam as a substitute, just for a little bit of color for the photo. I will share the recipe later.