This recipe for disaster was brought to you by one of those paleo “cooks” named Will-o’-the-Wisp or Paleo Princess or something, and I should have stopped right there because I’m not even on a paleo diet. However, since there was some almond flour in the pantry, and as I’ve been eating better of late, I typed ‘almond flour cake’ into the Google machine to see what came up. It brought me down a winding and dangerous dark-web path to this paleo recipe of pineapple upside down cake. We had all but the pineapple to make it, so I stopped by Price Chopper and picked up a freshly-cored p-apple. I sliced it up, lined the bottom of a springform pan with the fruit, then made the sad little bit of batter.
It felt wrong from the beginning. What kind of batter was this? How could it be both too runny and too stiff? How could it be so lifeless? How it could be so… thin? There was no way it was going to even cover the pineapple. If it’s the same on both sides can it really be called an upside down cake? How would one even tell the damn difference? I sighed a gluten-free sigh as I shoved the mess into the oven.
Halfway through the cooking time I peeked in through the oven door. As suspected it had risen maybe all of two millimeters. The cherries weren’t close to submerged, so this would indeed be a cake that could work upside down, right side up, inside out or topsy turvy, assuming it was remotely edible. A big-ass assumption if ever there was one.
I took it out and let it rest for fifteen minutes. Releasing it from the spring-form pan, I had one single thought: doesn’t stick, my ass. Stupid lie of a recipe. I tried to cut it away from the sides. Somehow it came out intent. I flipped the piece of shit and miraculously it didn’t crumble. But it was about the thickness of a slice of pineapple, and just utterly crap. I managed to carve out a slice, then braved the ugly thing. It was a soggy, shitty forkful of something whose only purpose was to vex me and take up valuable space that could have been used for something much more enjoyable – like a fucking rice cake. A fucking stale rice cake. Oh well. I don’t need it if I want to fit into any holiday pants, I suppose.
This is why I don’t use almond flour or attempt healthy desserts – they just never turn out right – and I’m not going on the hunt for xantham gum or whatever the hell that is (it wouldn’t even let me type it in correctly for the first three times because no one wants to use it, not even antiquated WordPress sites). Can’t believe I wasted a pretty plate on this pine shit.
Anyway, write in another kitchen-baked fail to my impressive pancake-laden culinary curriculum vitae.
