Recipe #3: Cherry-Pineapple Dump Cake

Another dessert item? I’m figuring diabetes does not run in the Paul family. All this sugary stuff! This cookbook wouldn’t be half as sweet if Dr. Paul were a dentist instead of an OB/GYN.

But… “Dump”? Please let me believe this word was applied to this dessert’s name because of some cutesy Paul family moment. If “Dump Cake” is a more common term than that, I’m glad to have lived my forty-eight years without having previously run across it. The most charitable thing to deduce is that the term comes from this dish’s preparation: the ingredients

Ready for dumpage

never get mixed together, but are simply spread out into the pan one after the other…

Mix into the dump

dumped into the pan, to put it crudely. Needless to say, preparation is a snap.

I’ve never actually looked through any of those 202 Surprising Things to Do With Cake Mix-type cookbooks, but I imagine this recipe might well fit right in with any of them, since this dessert gets topped with yellow cake mix – dry and straight out of the box. Over that gets poured melted butter, which doesn’t absorb in at first.

Gold puddles top the dump

Let’s see: Layers of fruit, sweetened grain on top of that, the whole assemblage then gets baked… That would be anyone else’s definition of cobbler.

The dump gets “golden brown and bubbly”

It seems the butter, along with the pineapple juice that gets dumped (along with the crushed pineapple) into the pan first thing, soak in and/or steam up and moisten the cake mix as it bakes. The butter, cake mix, and toasted pecans really make a rich, fetching aroma. This is a flavorful dessert.

Warm dump

One thing I worried about before baking this was that the pineapple would perhaps add too much flavor. I love pineapple, but I thought it wouldn’t lend itself well to any sort of cobbler. No worries, as it turned out: The pineapple pieces were pretty inconspicuous in the final result, at least to me – apparently their role was mostly to serve as a sweetener.

None of this bothered my family, all of whom had good reports about this dish. We all liked it, but never could say the proper name of this dessert without tripping over the word “Dump”.

Lesson learned: O, be some other name!

                                What's in a name? that which we call a cobbler

                                By any other name would taste as sweet

Rating: Eight out of ten vaguely disgusting labels