How was this iconic recipe born? No one knows for sure. Skillet cakes — featuring fruit and sugar in the bottom of a cast iron skilled, topped with cake batter and cooked atop the stove — were common in both Europe and America for centuries. So it stands to reason that pineapple would eventually make its way into a skillet cake — which it did, probably sometime during the 1920s. At any rate, this version, with its bounty of both pineapple and cherries atop a brown sugar syrup-drenched golden cake, is a winner.