Baking A Hummingbird Cake

Hummingbird Cake is a traditional cake that has nuts, pineapple and banana added to the batter. I share my own version of this very delicious recipe with you in today's blog. Be warned: if you have not tried hummingbird cake before, you should prepare to fall in love. The recipe resembles a carrot cake recipe, aside from the addition of bananas, and the exclusion of carrots. You have to try this cake at least once in your life.

I cut thin slices for drying pineapple flowers and then chopped up the remainder of the pineapple finely. Set this aside for the moment.

In a large bowl, measure off your dry ingredients. You will need 4 cups (4 x 250 ml) cake flour, 2 cups (500 ml) sugar, 3 teaspoons (15 ml) baking powder, 1 teaspoon (5 ml) salt, and 1 teaspoon (5 ml) ground cinnamon.

Mix all the dry ingredients together.

Add three eggs, 2 teaspoons (10 ml) vanilla essence and 1 1/2 cups (375 ml) cooking oil. Mix this into the dry ingredients.

Add three bananas. The riper the bananas are, the better the flavour.

Chop up a cup of nuts. The best nuts to use would be pecans or walnuts, but I use whatever I have available in the house. This time it turned out to be macadamias. Add 1 cup (250 ml) of finely chopped nuts.

Measure off  225 g finely chopped pineapple and add this.

Mix everything together. Be sure to squash those bananas you added!

Treat three cake tins of equal size to non-stick spray.

Measure and line the bottoms with baking paper.

Divide the batter equally among the three cake tins.

Bake in a preheated oven for 30-40 minutes at 180 °C. When a test pin comes out clean, and the cake pulls away from the sides, it is ready to come out of the oven.

Allow the cakes to cool in the cake tins. Once cooled down, loosen the sides with a knife.

Turn the cakes over on a wire rack.

Carefully pull away the wax paper.

Traditionally a cream cheese frosting is used on this cake, but I did not have any cream cheese in the house and opted to use royal icing instead. The icing comes between each cake layer and on the top one. Stack the layers on top of each other.

Ice the cake on the sides as well.

Traditionally the hummingbird cake is decorated with a layer of nuts. I opted to use my pineapple flowers along with some fresh strawberries, instead, allowing them to cascade off the cake.

Marietjie Uys (Miekie) is a published author. You can buy the books here:
You can purchase Designs By Miekie 1 here.

Jy kan Kom Ons Teken en Verf Tuinstories hier koop.
Jy kan Kom Ons Kleur Tuinstories In hier koop.
Jy kan Tuinstories hier koop.
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