Giada De Laurentiis’ Mini Pineapple Cakes Are Moist, Delicious — and Portable — Treats – Showbiz Cheat Sheet
Perfect for toting to holiday gatherings this season, Giada De Laurentiis‘ Mini Pineapple Cakes are fun and easy to make for even beginner bakers. Here’s how to make the Food Network host’s five-star dessert.
Giada De Laurentiis, right, works on a dish with ‘Today’ co-anchor Al Roker |
Nathan Congleton/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images
De Laurentiis uses fresh pineapple in her recipe but canned is fine, too
While the chef’s recipe calls for a chopped three-pound pineapple, she noted that a 20-ounce can of crushed pineapple works just fine as well. Be sure to drain and reserve the juice from the can for later in the recipe.
For the recipe, you’ll also need light brown sugar, unsalted butter, egg whites, water, vegetable oil, almond extract, and a box of white cake mix. You can find the complete recipe, as well as accompanying video, and reviews on Food Network’s site.
How to make the chef’s dessert
The crushed pineapple, whether you’ve poured it out of a can or crushed the fresh fruit in a food processor, is heated in a skillet until it’s “a little caramelized because it’s sort of an upside-down cake, so you want the bottom to be caramelized,” De Laurentiis says in the FN video for this recipe.
Two tablespoons of the unsalted butter and a half-cup of brown sugar are added to the pineapple: “Kind of gives it a smokier flavor. We’ll just cook it down, caramelize it, and evaporate all of the liquid, and get it nice and brown.”
While the pineapple cooks, the cake can get started. While it’s usually best to follow the instructions on the cake mix box, De Laurentiis asks that we stick with her departure from the back-of-the-box recipe for this one. First of all, she’s using only the egg whites from three eggs: “The reason I’m using just the whites is to get it a little bit fluffier,” the Everyday Italian host explained.
To the whites, she adds two-thirds cup of water, half of what the box mix calls for. “I’ve divided [the amount of water used] because the flavor of pineapple, I really want that flavor to come out, so I’m going to split it with half water, half pineapple juice,”‘ she said. The cake mix is stirred into the mixture (“I promise you nobody will even know it’s cake mix”) along with two-thirds of a cup each of vegetable oil and pineapple juice. Almond extract is …….