Makes one 9-inch cake
Ambrosia, food of the gods in Greek and Roman mythology, is something a bit more humble in most American households, where it’s better known as a chilled fruit salad, often made with mandarin oranges, pineapple, and coconut. The tall and tropical ambrosia cake, made with angel food cake, pineapple curd, and orange and vanilla frostings, has more heavenly aspirations.

WHY THIS RECIPE WORKS:
To prevent our Ambrosia Cake recipe’s pineapple curd from curdling, we combined the hot juice and egg-and-sugar slowly. We cut our angel food cake into four layers and sandwiched the curd and the orange and pineapple slices in between. We then used orange-flavored frosting to adhere the orange slices, and the pineapple curd to adhere the pineapple slices.

Serves 8

If you can’t find frozen pineapple, substitute fresh.

WHY THIS RECIPE WORKS:
For a sweeter, fresher flavor, we opted for frozen pineapple, which was more consistent than fresh fruit. We also drastically decreased the butter and used fat-free sour cream in place of the full-fat variety. To improve the color of the cake, we replaced some of the white sugar in the batter with brown. Because brown sugar is moister and more flavorful than white sugar, we could reduce the total sugar in the batter without worrying the cake would be dry or undersweetened. Merely topping pineapple with batter and baking the cake in the oven resulted in a soggy mess. To combat the problem, we sautéed the fruit with sugar on the stovetop to caramelize the pineapple and reduce some of the juices.

Traditional pineapple upside-down cake recipes have 430 calories, 18 grams of fat, and 13 grams of saturated fat per slice. Our changes brought the numbers down to 310 calories, 9 grams of fat, and 6 grams of saturated fat.

great!