ON THE MENU: Pineapple upside down cake with a dark rum sauce, which was inspired by a dessert that Ali had while with her family in Maui. The dessert comes from the Pineapple Grill at the Kapalua Resort, where her family ate dinner for her brother's birthday. P.S. This dessert won the Maui Gold Pineapple Dessert Contest Award.
After searching online, Ali found the recipe for the award-winning dessert. We're not sure if it is the exact recipe used at the resort restaurant, because the recipe was a little vague and the rum sauce tasted different. The recipe is traditionally made with locally-made macadamia nut ice cream, however here in Portland we substituted this ice cream for vanilla. The recipe can be found here: http://archives.starbulletin.com/2008/07/30/features/story03.html
We learned a lot from making this recipe:
a) how difficult and scary it is to burn off the alcohol (from the rum in the sauce). Once it seemed all burned off, the sauce still had a strong taste of rum. Even pro chef JoAnne (Ali's mom) wasn't sure why. We figured there was some discrepancy in the sauce recipe when compared to the real thing from the resort.
b) cutting the pineapple in perfect circles was hard - you either had to cut it into pieces and form it at the bottom of the cup, or be very careful to cut out the inedible middle part.
c) although the recipe warned the batter oozes over while cooking (and you get to break it off and eat it hehe), we underestimated how much it was spill over. But we got to eat a lot! Maybe we filled the cups too much, which was about two-thirds.
a) how difficult and scary it is to burn off the alcohol (from the rum in the sauce). Once it seemed all burned off, the sauce still had a strong taste of rum. Even pro chef JoAnne (Ali's mom) wasn't sure why. We figured there was some discrepancy in the sauce recipe when compared to the real thing from the resort.
b) cutting the pineapple in perfect circles was hard - you either had to cut it into pieces and form it at the bottom of the cup, or be very careful to cut out the inedible middle part.
c) although the recipe warned the batter oozes over while cooking (and you get to break it off and eat it hehe), we underestimated how much it was spill over. But we got to eat a lot! Maybe we filled the cups too much, which was about two-thirds.
d) we used paper cups instead of metal ones because they were really expensive; this definitely affected cooking time. We had to leave the cakes in the oven for over twice as long as the recipe said. This could've also related to us filling the cups too much?
Despite our learning curve, the cakes were AMAZING. We could barely stop ourselves from eating all eight of them. Good thing so much batter spilled over :). The sauce wasn't too great... We only ate it with the display cake. We're thinking that the recipe was different than that of the restaurant's - maybe less rum and more brown sugar? Other than that, Ali said everything tasted up to par, and similar to the dessert she had in Maui. Overall we deemed it a success!!!!We definitely recommend this recipe with these variations: make one large cake instead of little ones, forget the rum sauce, and maybe serve it as a breakfast cake! Yum! Also, Ali highly recommends the Pineapple Grill if you ever find yourself near Napili Bay; she says although the meal was very pricey, it was one of the best meals (and desserts!) of her life.
KITCHEN TALK:
- Stella!! Ali is dog-sitting for a neighbor this week, and they have the cutest king charles cavalier named Stella. Ash and Ali are walking her every day.
- How Maddie is doing with Ben in New Jersey. WE MISS HER!! Come home soon :).
- Shout out to Zumba!! Ash has started taking the class with Ali. Now we just gotta get all three of us together for it! So fun!
- Lots of other things but we forget...
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