Pineapple upside down cake--my favorite Polish dessert

Growing up in a Polish, Austrian, German, Croatian, etc. family can be confusing. My mother tended to follow the Polish customs for holiday cuisine at home, so when pineapple upside down cake, to my delight, appeared at the end of a dinner, I took it as super tasty part of the culture.

Many years later, when attending a SIETAR Congress in Bath, I was walking across a bridge, which had shops along the side of the road, one of which was a bakery with a lovely collection of desserts in the window. Being an inveterate foodie, I stopped to admire. I was stunned to find my mother's pineapple upside down cake in the middle of the display. It said, "Buy me!" I did, and it was indeed my mother's cake to he last tooth-sucking morsel. 

Only then did I make the connection. At age 13 my mother when to work as a cook's apprentice at Wallace Arms, a Cleveland boarding residence, under the tutelage of a certain Elisabeth Scott, herself an immigrant from Scotland. At this point the pineapple cake explained itself along with Christmas pudding and a number of their other sweet colleagues.