Jeni's - Pineapple Upside Down Cake

Pineapple Upside Down Cake - Sweet-tart Pineapple with Golden Cake, Red Cherries, and a Caramel Swirl

Recently, I ordered a shipment from Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams because of their extremely limited batch flavor inspired by the Outlander television series called Claire's Cabinet.  One of the bonuses of making such an impulsive purchase is that I get to fill out the order with more pints from Jeni's!  Today's flavor is one of those pints.  It is new flavor this year called Pineapple Upside Down Cake and has an interesting combination of pineapple, cherry, cake and caramel.  A reminder to local readers that I bought this online and I do not believe that any local grocery stores are stocking this flavor.

An upside down cake is a fun cake where the toppings of the cake are added to the bottom of the cake pan before the batter and the whole thing is cooked together.  Then when the pan is flipped over to remove the cake, the cooked toppings are back on top.  Pineapple is the most popular topping for these types of cakes because rings of pineapple that you can buy in a can hold their shape when cooked.  There are lots of recipes online.  Jeni herself even has an instructional video from several years ago showing how to adapt a "Lady Cake" recipe from her own cookbook into a pineapple upside down cake.  And now we have an ice cream from her to try.  Yum!

(Edit: this month Jeni's has added a pineapple upside down cake recipe to their website blog)

Popping off the lid, I see an extra wrapper on top.  I think this is the new normal from Jeni's now.  I like it.  Peeling back the wrapper, I see a cream-colored base with a large dark caramel swirl meandering across the top of it.  Digging in, I taste the pineapple right away.  The pineapple flavor is good -- not too sweet and not too tart.  Checking the ingredient list, the base is a mixture of buttermilk frozen yogurt and ice cream.  I've never seen that before, but the results are good.  There are a few small pineapple pieces in the mix as well.  That's not all, though.  Occasionally, I find a small cherry piece.  The cherry flavor does not dominate any individual spoonful, but I can tell it is in there.  I find a cake piece from time to time.  The effect of the cake is only textural -- soft and chewy -- but it is still good.  Then, there is the dark caramel swirl which is simply delicious.  It has a bit more of a brown sugar flavor than the usual caramel.

This is an excellent new flavor from Jeni's.  Flavors with so many ingredients have the risk of being either overmixed where you can't perceive the individual flavors or they are undermixed where the flavors you feel like there are multiple scoops in the same carton.  This somehow has mastered the 'half-blend' where every spoonful contains all the flavors but you can still taste them all indivudually.  I really enjoyed this and it should be a hit with pineapple lovers.