Apple upside-down cake using HappyCall Pan

Yes, I've jumped into the bandwagon of the HappyCall Pan craze too! Was already very tempted to buy the pan when I saw the home shopping network advert but hesitated as I didn't want another white elephant in my already cluttered kitchen. Then, one by one, food bloggers started to post their recipes and food photos in their blogs and I became convinced that I had to buy the pan! LOL! Still I didn't want to pay S$108 for it (as advertised by the home shopping network, lejel), so I turned to Gmarket since quite a number of bloggers bought theirs through Gmarket without a problem. So there you have it, my HappyCall Pan (standard size) for S$62.90!

Bought it for about 2 months already and so far only used it a few times to fry fish (my main purpose of getting this pan), "铁板豆腐" and tofu with leeks. When I saw Cuisine Paradise's recipe on Apple and Pineapple upside-down cake, I was a little skeptical about baking a cake using a pan over stove. But since it was fairly easy, I had a go at it. 

The cake batter ingredients were all available in my pantry, mainly plain flour, baking powder, sugar, eggs, butter, oil, vanilla extract and some lemon zest. I was a little concerned with the relative large amount of baking powder used but went ahead anyway. Didn't have any grapeseed oil so I substituted with olive oil. Reduced the amount of sugar by a third as well.

The caramel apple ingredients were simple too, butter, brown sugar (reduced the amount of sugar by a third), cinnamon, apples, lemon juice, water, raisins and walnuts which I omitted.

Was pretty worried during cooking process and kept fidling with the stove as I was trying to keep the heat low but not too low (else worried it might go off by itself). In the end, the cake turned out ok, but some parts were slightly charred :(

I thought the cake turned out fair, albeit rather ugly looking. Taste wise was ok, quite dense and a little moist when warm but sort of hardened when cooled. I love the caramel apple but didn't really like the texture of the cake which was very similar to pound/butter cake. Well, in the first place I'm not a fan of pound cake. Dear son enjoyed it very much though, he had a large slice for tea and asked for more (I didn't grant him though).

Would I try baking cake using the HCP again? I must say that it's really convenient to cook the caramel apples in the pan and then just pour the cake batter over. But I don't know if I'll try again, perhaps if a good recipe comes along.