Some good ideas of what to do on the hottest day of the year:
- Clear out 11 bags of rubbish from your flat
- Try on your winter coats to see which ones fit
- Re-arrange the linen closet (which happens to house the building's hot water pipes)
- Unpack the final boxes from when you left home 5 1/2 years ago
- Stand in your tiny aireless kitchen caramelising pineapple to make this pineapple, coconut and rum upside down cake.
I had a plan for this weekend. A plan that involved a major clear out of the flat so that my boyfriend doesn't have to continue living out of a suitcase and, more importantly, making cake and I wasn't going to let something as ridiculous as a heatwave get in the way of it.
So I spent the weekend lugging boxes about, cleaning things that I didn't even know I could clean and traipsing up and down the stairs to the rubbish bins. Seeing the floor in my (sorry, 'our') bedroom is a novel experience. Not being a tidy person by nature, I find it hard to imagine that it will stay this way for long - over the course of the weekend I managed to tidy, untidy and then tidy again the living room several times - but it's a step forward and I feel much better for it.
When I collapsed on the sofa at the end of the weekend, having hurled the last bag of rubbish and an old, broken artificial Christmas tree into the big bins outside, I was very grateful to be able to dive headfirst into this cake. The coconut cake, adapted from a recipe in The Guardian, is a dream in itself, fluffy, moist and oh so coconutty. The introduction of pineapple, caramelized for a few minutes in butter and sugar, takes it to the next level of tropical. If I hadn't eaten all the ice cream the night before in a fit of greed, a scoop or two alongside the cake would be wonderful as well. This cake is what summer evenings should be made of...
Pineapple, coconut and rum upside down cake (makes a 23cm circular cake)
For the pineapple
500g fresh pineapple
50g unsalted butter
2 tbs caster sugar
For the cake
100ml coconut milk
50g dessicated coconut
1 tsp vanilla extract
30ml rum
165g unsalted butter, softened plus more for the tin
200g caster sugar
2 eggs
185g plain flour
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1. Preheat the oven to 175F. Line a tin with parchment paper and grease well with butter.*
2. In a saucepan, heat the coconut milk until boiling, take off the heat and stir in the dessicated coconut, vanilla and rum. Leave to cool for 30 minute and wonder how this mixture can smell so amazingly good.
3. While cooling, cut the pineapple into thin slices. Melt the butter and sugar in a frying pan and, when hot, add the pineapple slices and caramelize on each side (about 3-5 minutes per side). Remove from the heat, allow to cool and place the pineapple in a layer at the bottom of the cake tin. Pour over the syrup from the pan.
4. To make the cake, beat together the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Beat in the eggs one at a time until combined and then fold in half the flour/baking powder, half the coconut mixture, the rest of the flour/baking powder and finally the last of the coconut.
5. Pour into the tin and bake for 25-30 minutes until a toothpick comes out clean. Leave to cool for 10 minutes before transferring to a wire rack.
* Don't be an idiot like me and use a spring form tin with a removable base because you will get pineapple syrup everywhere. Having a circle of parchment paper at the bottom of your tin though is a good idea because you can turn out the cake and then peel it off thus minimising the risk of you losing any of the lovely topping.