Pineapple Cake for my Leo

August is a month of celebrations in my family, as its my hubby’s B'day and then  comes our wedding anniversary. So its perfect  time for me to do some good  baking for these occasions. My hubby did not want chocolate  in the cake for his birthday, then was contemplating to make a fruit cake or a pineapple however I felt  I would bake a  pineapple cake as I had not shared the recipe here.  

Well  the flavor of the pineapple with the combination of soft spongy vanilla and whipping cream and with some chunky pineapples in between is really amazing.  Infact I love baking these layer cakes wonder why  I like that so much.

For the vanilla sponge:

Eggs – 6

Sugar – 1 cup

Cake flour – 1 cup all purpose flour minus 2 tbsp + 2tbsp cornstarch/ flour

Vanilla extract - 1tsp

Mix the  below ingredients and make the soaking liquid

Pineapple can : 1 tin *

Water – 1  cup or the pineapple juice from the can **

Sugar –  6 tbsp

Pineapple essence - 2 tbsp

* Cut some pieces of the pineapple and  keep some rings for garnishing on the top of the cake

** If the canned pineapple is not sweet then you may have to add more sugar to your taste as we need the syrup to be sweet and not sour. Be generous and  make the cake moist with the pineapple soaking liquid. The cake will taste amazing.

Additional

Whipping cream – 400ml 

Powdered Sugar - 4 tbsp 

For the Butter cream for yellow flowers:

Butter : 4 tbsp

Food Colour : I used yellow  or  your choice of the colour

Powdered Sugar  : 1.5 tbsp

Beat this well to a creamy form and let it sit in the refrigerator for 10 minutes and put this into a piping bag and decorate as you wish.

METHOD

Preheat the oven to 180 C.

Grease and line  the tin with a bit of butter and put ½ spoon of the flour and dust the pan and keep it aside.

Sift the  dry ingredients together and keep aside.

Beat the eggs and sugar on a high speed using an electric beater for about 10 to 15 minutes. This step is highly important because we are not using any oil or margarine. The beating of the mixture will cause air to be incorporated and later give volume to the cake.

Now fold the dry ingredients into the batter carefully so that you do not lose the air incorporated. The mixture will deflate a little but that is ok and go ahead making it.

Pour the batter into the prepared tin and bake in the preheated oven for 25 to 30 minutes until a toothpick inserted comes out clean. Remember Oven temperatures do vary, keep an eye on the cake after 20 minutes so that it is not burnt.

Cool the cake completely.

Now cut the cake into 2 or 3 rings and keep aside.

Keep one ring on the flat surface and pour the soaking liquid little to make it moist and spread  some whipped cream and chopped pineapples on this layer. Place the  2^nd ring and do the same as the 1^st  ring and if you have third keep that on the 2 layers and then spread the whipped cream all over the cake and garnish with chocolate flakes  and pineapple slices and decorate using your imagination.

Let it chill in the fridge for few hours, the more chill the cake is so tastier and yummy. Believe me we both loved the cake so much.

Latha