What do you bake next when you have to factor in your husband’s dislike for chocolate? (I KNOW!!) In India, it’s not easy nor cheap to get good berries for baking, so when it comes to fruit in baking, pineapple pops up first – it’s sweet, tangy and keeps its shape. I’ve already tried a pineapple upside-down cake for husband’s birthday once, so it was time for something different.

I have been into eggless baking recently, and the recipes I tried searching for over the internet were either pineapple cream pastries or upside-down cakes. I hence modified an eggless vanilla sponge recipe into a pineapple one.

I already have a tried and tested eggless vanilla cake recipe which doesn’t contain condensed milk (recipe here) (I somehow feared it will make the cake overbearingly sweet, surprisingly it didn’t since I added no extra sugar). This recipe has condensed milk and vinegar-baking soda combination to get the light and airy cake since eggless cakes tend to get dense and dry. I also made my own cake flour and used it instead of all-purpose flour. All in all, I was safe on all sides 🙂 The results weren’t disappointing at all – cake was super moist and light – see for yourselves 🙂

Oh about the bundt pan! I got this beautiful pan from Woolworths, South Africa which has the combination of silicon and aluminium with great ridges. You can make this recipe in a large 9×13 inch pan instead if you don’t have a bundt pan or halve the recipe for an 8″ pan or even a 9″x5″ loaf pan (Read about converting recipes between different pans on the blog here). Please note that this is a wet batter and takes a bit longer to cook. The weight of the final cake was approx. 1200 grams.

Enough with the talk! Let’s get baking 🙂

Ingredients –

All Purpose flour – 310 g / 2½ cups (Use Cake flour instead – instructions to make your own are just after the process)
Baking Powder – 2 Tsp
Baking Soda – 1 Tsp
Salt – ¼ Tsp
Condensed Milk – 1 can of 400 grams / 300 ml
Butter – 112 grams / ½ cup – melted
Water – 120ml (½ cup)
Pineapple slices – 4 to 5, roughly chopped up into pieces, drained
Syrup from the can of pineapple slices – 120ml (½ cup)
Vinegar (I used apple cider) – 2 tablespoons
Pineapple Essence – 1 tsp
Vanilla Essence – 1 tsp

Icing sugar for dusting

Process –

1. Pre-heat oven to 180 degrees Celcius.
2. Grease the baking pan with some butter, especially the ridges. You can use non-stick spray too.
3. Mix all the dry ingredients together in a bowl – flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt.
4. Add the pineapple chunks and mix well till the pieces are coated with flour.
5. In a separate bowl, mix the melted butter and condensed milk until well combined. Add the water, pineapple syrup from the can, pineapple essence and vanilla essence. Add the vinegar. Mix till combined.
6. Add the wet ingredients to dry and whisk well until combined. DO NOT over whisk else you’ll end up with a dense cake.
7. Immediately pour the batter into the prepared tin and put in the preheated oven for baking. You do not want to waste the reaction from vinegar and baking soda 🙂
8. Bake the cake for 50-55 minutes until a skewer inserted comes out clean. After about 45 minutes I felt my cake top was getting brown but still was undercooked beneath, so I covered it with aluminium foil and continued baking. I removed the foil for the final 1 minute to get the crust right.
9. Once cooked, transfer the pan to a cooling rack and remove the cake after 15-20 minutes. Place the cake on the rack for it to cool down completely. Dust some icing sugar on top.

How to make cake flour (recipe from here – you can read more about protein content in flours) – Measure out 2 and 1/2 cup (310 g) of all-purpose flour from the recipe. Remove 5 tablespoons of all-purpose flour and place it back in your flour canister. Replace the removed all-purpose flour with 5 tablespoons of cornstarch/cornflour. Sift flour 4-5 times to ensure the mixture is thoroughly combined and also aerate the flour in the process.