March is the month when cooking gets rather boring. As I long for the warm weather of spring — a season that begins in a mere 16 days, hip hip hooray — I want to leave the heavy comfort foods of winter behind.
Do I want to start a sourdough that will take seven days to make? Well, not really. How about that baked pasta dish that’s been buzzing like a bee in my bonnet for weeks? Possibly, if it rains — and the gods forbid the March blizzard of ’93 and its 20 inches of snow happening again — there’s nothing else to do. Do I want to try some new, crazy variant on a flourless chocolate cake? Absolutely not.
Well, then what do I want to do? I want to go to the beach, and I want to go to barbecues. I’ve got goals, you see: I want to perfect the mint julep in time for the Kentucky Derby. That’ll give me a couple of months to do so. I want to travel to Italy and eat a margarita pizza. Oh yes, I’ll be doing that in a couple of weeks. I want to bring buckets of just-made slaw to a neighborhood gathering, make more of my almost-famous chicken salad and arrive with the kind of cake you don’t have to make a big deal out of: No fancy frosting, no filling, no baubles or piping.
Enter pineapple upside-down cake.
Don’t let thoughts of the 1970s cake with rubbery canned pineapple slices and artificially colored cherries scare you. Just two things separate a great pineapple upside-down cake from a cake with only pineapples on top are two things, three if you include the absence of red fruit-like gems: fresh pineapple and a layer of freshly made caramel.