Crock-Pot Pineapple Upside Down Cake: FAIL

Well, as you can read from the title of this post, my crock-pot cake was a fail. Unfortunately I have pictures to prove it.

Here is the first step, the adding of the melted butter and brown sugar mixture to the bottom of the crock pot.

Next I added the pineapple rings....

...and then poured the cake batter overtop.

Here it is, baking away rather contently.

Then the time came for me to shut off the crock-pot and turn it upside down onto a plate, hoping that the cake will gracefully slide out. I should mention that at this point I had turned the crock-pot off an hour before the recipe indicated because I was smelling a slight burning smell in my house (okay it wasn't slight, but I was firmly planted in denial. Whatever.) and thought maybe that's long enough. So, I turned it upside down and to my surprise, it did gracefully slide out. Too bad it looked like this:

As absolutely terrible as that looks, all was not totally lost. This side of the cake took the worst of it and was burnt to the inside of the crock-pot. After peeling away the black parts you see, I was actually left with an incredibly moist, albeit smaller, crock-pot cake. Here is a picture of the other side, which turned out perfectly:

Looks good huh! 

We had a piece last night and it was really, really yummy. Some of you may be wondering why I would even try to salvage this cake, let alone actually eat it, but I couldn't waste it. I hate just throwing away money, and this cake had time and effort invested in it as well. Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't serve this to people at a dinner party! But since it's just the 3 of us, it wasn't a big deal. I learned a lesson, if I ever do this again, to once in awhile turn the inner container that the cake bakes in. Since just one side of the cake was burned, I'm thinking that was the side where the heating element was, so if I turn it it should bake evenly. 

It wasn't the prettiest birthday cake I'd ever seen, but it was mine :)