(And WTH is a pineapple sponge anyway?)

Hello. I’m Cat. You may know me from my posts on the Facebook group Rate My Hospital Plate (hereafter RMHP, because writing it in full every time is going to be a pain), where for the past few weeks I been sharing rambling posts about being in hospital, hospital food, and anything else that occurs to me when faced with a blank “What’s on your mind?” space.

I started posting largely to entertain myself during a long (seven week) stay in St Mary’s Hospital on the Isle of Wight, and was pleasantly surprised when a lot of people enjoyed my meanderings and encouraged me to keep writing. I promised a post-hospital blog, and here it is. (It’s a bit rough around the edges atm as I wasn’t expecting to leave hospital quite this soon, and really wasn’t ready to launch the site yet, but needs must and we’ll all have to live with it. A slicker, more professional version is in the pipeline and will be along soon.)

So – why pineapple sponge?

British hospital food is a long-standing joke and, if you spend any time on RMHP – which I strongly recommend you do, as it’s both entertaining (albeit often in a horror movie, watching through your fingers kind of way) and a lovely, supportive community – you will see that in many hospitals the terrible reputation is well deserved.

St Mary’s, however, is a rare thing these days, being in possession of a working kitchen staffed by dedicated, highly skilled professionals who every day provide meals for hundreds of patients, staff, and visitors, across multiple buildings, as well as to the Full Circle restaurant which is open to the public. Not only do they prepare hundreds of meals a day, every day of the week and every week of the year, but these meals are GOOD. In my seven weeks in hospital, eating two meals a day from the kitchen (breakfast is prepared and served by the endlessly hard working ward staff), I had only two, maybe three, truly bad meals (plus a few that were, due to inter-ward transfers, the meals chosen by other people and not what I would have picked, and the kitchen can hardly be blamed for the result).

I spent a lot of space and words in my RMHP posts giving the staff of the St Mary’s kitchen all the recognition they so richly deserve – all praise to the Great Spirits of the Kitchen! – and I will doubtless do the same in at least some future posts.

Yes, very good. But why pineapple sponge?

Oh, yes, sorry, I got sidetracked – if you stay reading this blog you’ll find it happens a lot. St Mary’s kitchen does excellent hot puddings and, for me, the best of a very good bunch is the pineapple sponge. It’s a real shame it’s only served once every two weeks, and that my last day at St Mary’s didn’t coincide with pineapple sponge day. 😢

And what is a pineapple sponge?

For those not native to Britain, “pineapple sponge¹” may not mean much so, for ease of mutual understanding, I will explain here that it is a hot dessert made up of cake (the ‘sponge’ , usually made with eggs and butter and therefore quite rich, although it should be light and fluffy, not dense), with chunks of pineapple stirred through the cake mix before it’s baked.

It can be served with custard – my favourite – or with cream or ice cream. The basic sponge can also be flavoured with lemon, or chocolate, or be stirred through with chocolate chips, or dried fruit, or other types of fresh fruit, or be poured over jam, or syrup, or berries, or used in a many other delicious ways.

There are many recipes online if you want to try this typically British food; I will be contacting the St Mary’s kitchen to beg them for the recipe for my beloved pineapple sponge and, if they are kind enough to oblige, I will ask them if I can share it with y’all. I’ll let you know in due course.

Thanks for reading! 🍍

1. The ‘pineapple’ bit is fairly obvious – I think I described it somewhere as a cross between a hedgehog having a bad hair day and an old-fashioned pin cushion, that you can eat – but the ‘sponge’ bit has caused some confusion, hence this explanation. ↩︎