Maui Gold Pineapple Upside Down Cake

This is a picture of a piece of pineapple upside down cake. A very good piece of pineapple upside down cake, which I happened to eat at the chic tapas bar Bar Acuda on the island of Kauai, Hawaii during a vacation there in the summer of 2010. (It is worth noting that the tapas bar craze has clearly left no territory untouched, not even the wild and lush north shore of Kauai.)

As you might imagine, all the servers at Bar Acuda were thin and blonde and gorgeous, probably from, like, surfing all day. As I watched them chatting with the bartenders and gracefully delivering plates, I could easily imagine myself dropping out of graduate school, moving to Kauai, and being an ultra-cool slacker chick who waits tables by night and rules the water as a surfing queen by day. But I digress!

Back to the cake. It was tasty and fruity if a little bit dry, served with just the right amount of vanilla ice cream. I liked it. Little did I know that several days later I would have yet another piece of pineapple upside down cake that would completely blow this one away.

So, this second piece of pineapple upside down cake came from the Pineapple Grill, a fancy place at the Kapalua resort on Maui that makes Pacific Island food using local Hawaiian ingredients. It was our splurge dinner of our two-week trip, and totally worth it. We got seated at a table facing a huge window and got to witness the sunset going through all of its colors while we ate—from pink to orange to deep purple. Bottles of wine were half-price that night, so we had that giddy feeling of getting a good deal, and the food was great, especially the macadamia nut-crusted mahi-mahi with edamame risotto. But the highlight of the meal, in case you hadn’t guessed, was dessert.

Now, I was reluctant to order pineapple upside down cake again, because you can’t keep eating the same dessert every night (can you?), but the server told me this was the Pineapple Grill’s “signature dessert.” Sometimes when places have a signature dish, it ends up being sort of boring and mass-produced seeming, but not in this case. This cake was made with fresh pineapple grown on the island of Maui and came swimming in a thick rum-caramel sauce that was rich with the flavors of butter and brown sugar. The macadamia nut ice cream on top (made by local company Roselani Ice Cream) melted swiftly into the whole thing, creating this delightfully messy mash-up of cake, ice cream, and sauce that had me swooning. Seriously, I could not stop declaiming about how good this was. To my husband. To the server. To the people at the table next to me. To anyone who would listen.

It was at this very moment that I decided to make up something called a Dessert Hall of Fame, where I will chronicle my favorite desserts of all time, desserts that have created eye-rolling, jaw-dropping moments of awesomeness. Sadly, tragically, I did not bring my camera with me to dinner that night and I don’t have a photo of this cake. Which, I realize, is very anti-climactic. So, I decided to try to make the cake at home, using a recipe posted on the restaurant’s website.

This, my friends, led to what can only be described as a total kitchen debacle. Everything about the recipe seemed to be wrong-the ratio of ingredients, the oven temperature, the baking time. The final product looked like this:

It didn’t taste bad, exactly, the texture was just more like a sugar cookie than a cake. It’s possible that Hawaiian kitchens are different from those on the mainland, but I have come to the conclusion that the folks at the Pineapple Grill don’t actually want us to be able to make their signature dessert, which makes sense when you think about it. The sauce, however, was actually really good. I let it get a little bit too thick by having it on the heat too long, but if you serve it right away I think it would make a great topping for vanilla ice cream.