Gingerbread Cake...but where's the pineapple?

Seeing as we are on a bit of a roll with the 'bread cakes' as I call them, we chose Gingerbread Cake as our next challenge. It seemed pretty straightforward as far as ingredients go, although it did call for cloves which I left out. Don't care for them much. Here's the recipe in case anyone wants to try it:

3 tbsp shortening
1/2 cup sugar
1 egg
1/2 cup corn syrup
1 3/4 cup flour
1/2 tsp soda
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp ginger
1 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp ground cloves
1/4 tsp nutmeg
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 cup boiling water

Cream shortening and sugar, add beaten egg, then syrup. Mix and sift dry ingredients, then mix them into batter thoroughly. Add boiling water last.

We had gotten to this point in the instructions and were going along quite nicely when we got to the last line on the card, which read, "Pour batter over Pineapple mixture and bake..." Wait a minute. Pineapple mixture? What pineapple mixture? Who ever heard of pineapples in a gingerbread cake? I read back over the ingredients just to make sure I hadn't lost my mind. No, no pineapples were mentioned. Hmmm. After a very, very short period of debate we decided to skip that line; pretend it wasn't there and forge ahead. There were two reasons for this: first, I had no pineapples in the house, and second, I wouldn't have a clue how to make the 'pineapple mixture'. So instead, we pretended that the last line of the recipe went like this:
"Pour batter into baking pan and bake 30-35 minutes in moderate oven (425-450)."

I don't know if you've noticed, but Grandma Bess (as I've decided to call her) is pretty generous in her definition of 'a moderate oven'. For pumpkin pie and banana cake, a moderate oven is defined as 375. One recipe says moderate is 400. Here it is 425-450, which seems 'more than moderate' to me. I had visions of turning out a black lump of a cake if I baked it at 450 for 35 minutes! Maybe if a pineapple mixture was involved this would work, but without it I didn't dare try. So I set the oven at 400 and baked it for just over 25 minutes, and it was perfect. We don't miss the pineapple at all. If you ask me, all this cake needs is a generous helping of whipped cream on top. We may have to buy some tomorrow and give it a try.