pineapple upside-down cake
I gotta tell you–I get so boring in the summertime. As soon as that warm weather hits and a bright blue sky becomes de rigeur and not something worth stopping the presses over, any near-religious attraction I had to the shiny and the new goes into hibernation until the fall. Do I want to start a sourdough that will take seven days to make? Well, since you asked, not really. How about that baked pasta dish that been buzzing like a bee in my bonnet for weeks? Um, well, maybe. If it rains or something and there’s nothing else to do. Do I want to try some new, crazy variant on a classic cake with cardamom? No, no, no!
Well, then what do I want to do? I want to go to the beach, and I want to go to barbeques. I’ve got goals, you see: I want to perfect the mint julep this summer and uncover a way to travel with all the trappings of a freshly squeezed Tom Collins. I want to bring buckets of just-made slaw, make more of my famous vegetable skewers that could fit on eight grills and I want to arrive with the kind of cake you don’t have to make a big deal out of; no frosting, no filling, no baubles, jimmies or piping and a minimal number of bowls. The kind of cake you’ve been eating your whole life yet a bite of it in the off-season will bring you back to a lazy spring weekend and a pinata filled with airline bottles of Petron.
