Any good food blog should begin with a favorite recipe from your grandmother!



Of course, this wasn't my original intention. Originally, I was going to go on about the time that Sarah and I made pain au chocolat and filled up an entire 1000+ square foot apartment with smoke just because we used the wrong pan.



*Here's a helpful hint. . . be sure to use the right dish for the job. It could make the difference between a happy chocolate filled evening and a smokey chocolate filled evening.*



But, since I couldn't find that recipe in my trusty recipe box (Believe me, you don't want to see what the inside of this looks like.), I decided that I should ramble a bit about my grandma. That's really where the love of food begins, if you think about it. . . or at least where it began for me. I have so many fond memories of sitting around her house in the morning drinking coffee milk and eating Little Debbie snacks for breakfast - both treats that had no place in my mom and dad's house. As an adult, I've spent a good deal of time in antique shops and thrift stores rejoicing when I find a recipe box just like my mom-mom's. . . or that goofy Corning Ware with blue flowers because that's what she has stacked in her cabinets. I'm not even going to go into how expensive those stinking melamine Texas Ware mixing bowls are. It's funny because no matter how many retro pieces of kitchenware I buy, my food never does come out tasting like hers. That being said, as I was going through the recipe box looking for that pain au chocolat recipe, I came across my mom-mom's Pineapple Cake Filling recipe. It's a shame that no one bothers to make good cakes anymore. This has always been one of my favorites and is apparently something that's fairly universal among the older crowd. One of my good friends at the library, Mary, went on and on about how good her Pineapple Cake Filling recipe was one day, and I started to laugh when she was telling me the recipe. It's this exact one that my grandma makes. That being said, if your grandparents are still around, you probably have this one tucked in your recipe box too. . . but, for those of you that have lost the recipe or were never fortunate enough to have it. . . you're in luck. I'm going to copy mom-mom's recipe card word for word, so you don't miss anything!



This is for a 3 layer cake & top. I don't use icing.

Pineapple Cake Filling



1 large can crushed pineapple

1 cup sugar

1/2 stick butter

1 1/2 tbl. cornstarch, disolved in 1/4 cup water, cook until mixture starts to boil & thicken. Cool before using. If you have too much, you just eat the rest. It's good.



She also included the recipe for Coconut Filling even though she knows that I hate coconut. Nice, yeah? So, you get an extra recipe just because. . .



Coconut Filling for 1 Cake



3/4 cup sugar

1 tbl. corn starch . level spoon

1 cup can milk

1 egg yoke cook until thicken add 1 teaspoon flavor & coconut. I don't measure the coconut. Add what you like.



And that's that. To be fair, my grandma's not really a poor speller. . . Did I mention that she was cajun and that French is her first language? And she's pretty old and senile. . . ha ha ha. . . but I love her.