Making a pineapple and walnut cake – a picture guide for beginners

These pictures were taken when I made my favourite cake to celebrate twelve years of this blog. The recipe is nothing particularly special or exciting, and now that the Great British Bake-off is such a hit, this is probably incredibly tame, but I thought I’d share it anyway. (At least I’m assuming that’s likely the case – I’ve never actually watched the show apart from one Children-in-need episode.) There’s a possibility you’ve never put pineapple or walnut together in a cake before, and now is your chance to be inspired! …

Ingredients

6oz butter
6oz caster sugar
6oz self raising flour
3 eggs
1 cup of pineapple pieces
3/4 (that’s three quarters) of a cup of walnut pieces

 

Method
Put the butter and sugar in a mixer and leave it going for a couple of minutes. (If you don’t have a mixer, you’ll have to do it by hand for quite a bit longer. You can buy hand-held electric mixers pretty cheaply though.)

While it’s doing that, you can be beating the eggs. When the mixture is light and fluffy, start adding the egg a little at a time.

 

You can now take the bowl away from the mixer and add the flour, stirring it in with a serving spoon.

Then mix in the pineapple and walnut. The reason my recipe

is suddenly using American cup measurements here is because I was given these pretty ones for my birthday and I wanted to put them to good use. I also don’t have a recipe book to follow at this point so the amount was guesswork, and luckily turned out to be just right. (Sorry, I should have weighed it for you in case you don’t have cups, but I didn’t think of that at the time. It really doesn’t have to be precise though.)

The cake tin I use has one of those push up bottoms to make it easier for the cake to come out. I find though that some of the cake mixture finds its way through and then burns on the bottom of the over. I can’t stand this waste of cake, so I now line the tin with baking paper, and this saves me from greasing it as well. (Note, it has to be baking paper – you still need to grease grease-proof paper if you don’t want the cake to stick to it.)

Then put in the middle of a pre-heated oven on gas mark 4 or 180 degrees C for about forty minutes. Check after half an

hour though if yours is a fan oven. As you can see, mine was cooked on the top of ‘Bake’ in my Rayburn and took about an hour. Just take it out when it looks done. ie when the top is beginning to go brown, and when you press it, it springs back up.

Now I like this cake just as it is, when it’s still warm. However, I wanted icing and chocolate buttons on this particular occasion, so to mix the (sieved) icing sugar I used the pineapple juice instead of water for

another dimension to the flavour. You should wait for the cake to cool before icing it, otherwise it’s difficult to set and drips down the sides like this, but I was really short for time and impatient.

Yum yum, I’m salivating now thinking about it, even though the cake is long gone!  By the way, chopped tinned pears also works well if you’re not so keen on pineapple.

Have you got a reason to make a cake soon? A moving house anniversary? A cat’s birthday? A celebration of finding the telly remote? Do let me know!