Pineapple upside-down cake

Last night I made a pineapple upside down cake. I've never made this cake before and quite honestly, couldn't ever remember eating a pineapple upside down cake. Pineapples were buy one, get one free at my grocery store this week, so I got two.

I wasn't aware of this until two days ago, but pineapple upside down cake is one of Patrick's favorite cakes. I'm also learning that Patrick likes a lot of cakes. If you search for pineapple upside down cake on the internet, it helps to spell pineapple right. I was typing "pinnapple". I didn't even notice I was not spelling right! I ended up learning how to spell and used a recipe from Betty Crocker:

1/4
cup butter or margarine
2/3
cup packed brown sugar
9
slices pineapple in juice (from 14-oz can), drained
9
maraschino cherries without stems, if desired
1 1/3
cups Gold Medal® all-purpose flour
1
cup granulated sugar
1/3
cup shortening
1 1/2
teaspoons baking powder
1/2
teaspoon salt
3/4
cup milk
1
egg
1.
Heat oven to 350°F. In 9-inch square pan, melt butter in oven. Sprinkle brown sugar evenly over melted butter. Arrange pineapple slices over brown sugar. Place cherry in center of each pineapple slice.
2.
In medium bowl, beat remaining ingredients with electric mixer on low speed 30 seconds, scraping bowl constantly. Beat on high speed 3 minutes, scraping bowl occasionally. Pour batter over pineapple and cherries.
3.
Bake 50 to 55 minutes or until toothpick inserted in center comes out clean. Immediately place heatproof serving plate upside down over pan; turn plate and pan over. Leave pan over cake a few minutes so brown sugar mixture can drizzle over cake; remove pan. Serve warm. Store cake loosely covered.

I didn't use the cherries and I also added 1 (ish) tsp of vanilla to the cake batter. The batter was kind of bland and the vanilla perked it up a bit. Instead of using canned pineapple, I used fresh pineapple slices. Finally, I didn't need to bake the cake for 55 mins. I ended up using a 8 1/2 x 11 dish, so the batter was (obviously) more thin and didn't need to bake as long. I appreciated this because I felt like an hour was a long time to wait.

The cake turned out pretty well, if I may say so. I enjoyed eating it and thought it even looked ok for my first upside down cake!