Paleo Pineapple Upside Down Cake

When one of your best friends is going strict paleo for ~6 months, and loves pineapple upside down cake, and is celebrating her birthday what do you do?  You come up with a recipe for paleo pineapple upside down cake of course.  Oh man how I love it when a new recipe works perfectly on the first try!  You will notice this recipe is lacking its typical splash of color: maraschino cherries.  This is for three reasons.  1. Thanks to how they are preserved and sweetened, they aren’t paleo. 2. My best friend hates them.  3. I hate them.  Makes it pretty easy to omit them from this recipe.  I know it doesn’t haven’t anything to do with a typical pineapple upside down cake recipe, but if you really want some red color, quarter some strawberries and use those in place of cherries.  The strawberries will still work with the other flavors.

Perfect slice of paleo pineapple upside down cake

Ingredients:

1/4 cup Earth Balance soy free buttery spread

2/3 cup coconut crystals

10 slices pineapple (in pineapple juice, not syrup if buying canned)

5 large eggs

1/2 cup agave or coconut nectar

8oz unsweetened applesauce

1 tbl. vanilla extract

3/4 tsp. kosher or sea salt

3/4 tsp. baking soda

3/4 cup coconut flour, sifted

1 scoop vanilla egg white protein powder, sifted

Method:

Preheat oven to 350°F.  Prepare the cake batter.  Whisk together eggs, agave, applesauce, vanilla, and salt.  Sift together coconut flour, baking soda, and egg white protein powder and mix into wet ingredients.  Set cake batter aside.  Add Earth Balance buttery spread to a 9×7 or 8×8 inch baking dish (I recommend glass or ceramic) and place in the oven until melted.  Once “butter” is melted, carefully remove baking dish from oven and sprinkle coconut crystals evenly over melted butter coating the entire bottom of the dish.  Lay 10 pineapple slices on top of the coconut crystals.  I made an even layer of 6 and then overlapped 4 more slices.  Carefully pour and spread cake batter over pineapple and bake at 350°F until golden and cooked through, approximately 45 minutes.  Once cooked remove from oven, run a butter knife around the edge of the dish (between cake and dish) to loosen.  Carefully turn baking dish over onto cooling rack or plate but do not life baking dish off of cake.  The cake is too warm to turn out (remove from baking dish), but you want your melted coconut crystals to absorb down into the cake, this will allow for that.  When cool, lift the baking dish off of the cake.  Enjoy!

Paleo pineapple upside down cake