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This recipe was born out of Devin’s competitive spirit. One of our friends has a birthday party every year where they ask people to bring a certain food item and the birthday guy ranks and judges the food; this is probably the smartest birthday party idea I’ve heard- come on, bring me a food buffet of everything I LOVE. The categories to be judged in were: best ingredient, chocolicious, and never-any-leftovers. We were planning on making our famous pineapple upside down cake, but Devin was like “nooo, we can’t do that. We will automatically not qualify for the chocolate category.”
We put on our thinking caps (don’t judge, I taught elementary school) and merged a few recipes together while throwing some new stuff in. Namely, we decided to turn the cake into muffins, to add chocolate, and added more liquid to create a lot more moisture.
ITEMS USED TO MAKE THE RECIPE
Beyond kitchen baking basics like mixing bowls and a blender, I found the following items helpful.
- Silicone baking tin
We don’t cook with teflon because we’ve read it is very harmful to birds (and we love our pet bird most of the time). These silicone baking tins make it easy to pop the cakes out without damaging them. - A large serving platter
This wasn’t something we had in our normal wedding gift registry dish sets. However, Devin’s grandma gave us the beautiful hand-me-down dish below and we end up using it quite often. I love that the plate has pine needles and pine cones too around the border because we live in Georgia 🙂 .
- 1 cup of firmly packed dark brown sugar
- 1/2 cup unsalted butter
- 1 can (20 oz) of pineapple slices
- 1 1/2 cups all purpose flour
- 6 Tbsp cake flour
- 6 Tbsp of ground almonds (from about 2 oz of whole almonds)
- 3/4 teaspoon baking powder
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
- 1 3/4 cups of sugar
- 1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter at room temperature
- 4 eggs
- 3/4 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 3/4 cup sour cream
- 2 tablespoons of cocoa powder
- 2 tablespoons of butter
- 3/4 cup of chocolate chips
- Start by preheating the oven to 325.
- Prepare a muffin or cupcake tin with nonstick or butter (cook with a cookie sheet under the muffin tin as the cake juice did spill into the oven).
- Get a small mixing bowl and mix the topping ingredients.
- Place the topping ingredients into the muffin tips with one pineapple slice in each.
- Mix all of the dry ingredients in a mixing bowl.
- Take 3/4 cup of chocolate chips and 2 tablespoons of butter and microwave until chocolate melts.
- Mix all of the wet and dry ingredients for the cake, including the melted chocolate, with an electric mixer.
- Spoon mixed cake mix into each muffin tin to the top.
- Bake muffins for 30 minutes or when a toothpick comes out clean.
- When muffins come out of the oven, use a cookie sheet with rims to dump the muffin tins upside down (this is totally easier with two people).
- Repeat steps of buttering the muffin tin, filling it with the topping and pineapple, and putting wet cake mix into the muffin container until the mix is finished.
The recipe was a success and we’ll definitely be making this one again! The recipe didn’t win any awards at the party, but it wins an award in my book 😉 .