Hummingbird Cake Recipe
Hummingbird cake is an incredibly dense and wet layer cake with banana, pineapple, and warm spices, protected with swirls of rich cream cheese frosting and crunchy toasted pecans on pinnacle.
In case you’ve never had it but you’re a fan of banana cake, pineapple upside-down cake, or carrot cake you’re going to be very well charmed by our simpler-than-you’d-assume hummingbird cake recipe.
Hummingbird cake reigns supreme over the dessert table at Southern get-togethers, but to locate this recipe’s origins, you genuinely must go a piece farther south to Jamaica. in the past due ’70s, the Jamaican traveler Board attempted to lure more American travelers to the island with the aid of releasing press kits highlighting conventional Jamaican recipes.
One in all them became a delicious “hummingbird cake”, named in honor of Jamaica’s country wide fowl, the swallow-tailed hummingbird. (Or, as it’s recognised at the island, the health practitioner bird that's why you’ll additionally find recipes calling this a medical doctor hen cake.) Southern living magazine published the recipe in 1978, and inside the remaining forty years it’s grow to be their most requested recipe of all time.
Ingredients
CAKE
- 3 cups all-purpose flour, sifted
- 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
- 1¼ teaspoons kosher salt
- ¼ teaspoon ground nutmeg
- 1 teaspoon baking soda
- 3 eggs, beaten
- 1½ cups sugar
- 1⅓ cups vegetable oil
- ¼ cup buttermilk
- 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
- 2 cups very ripe banana, mashed (about 4 medium bananas or 16 ounces)
- 1 (8 oz) can crushed pineapple (or fresh chopped pineapple)
- 2 cups toasted chopped pecans, divided
CREAM CHEESE FROSTING
- 1 cup (2 sticks) butter, softened
- 2 (8 oz) packages of cream cheese, softened
- ¼ teaspoons kosher salt
- 6 cups powdered sugar
- 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 350°F/one hundred seventy five°C.
- Grease and flour 3 8-inch cake pans.
- In a huge bowl, integrate the flour, cinnamon, salt, nutmeg, and baking soda.
- Upload the eggs, sugar, vegetable oil, buttermilk, and vanilla extract, and stir simply till the dry ingredients are moistened.
- Stir within the mashed bananas, overwhelmed pineapple, and one cup of chopped pecans, and stir simply until flippantly blended.
- Divide the batter flippantly between your 3 lined cake pans (approximately 22 ounces according to pan). Bake for 25 – half-hour, or till a toothpick or cake tester inserted inside the center comes out smooth. Cool the desserts inside the pans for 10 minutes, after which take away them from the pans and switch them to cord racks to chill absolutely.
- Make the cream cheese frosting: beat collectively the butter, cream cheese, and salt with a hand mixer until easy and creamy. regularly upload in the powdered sugar on low pace, till it's miles all included. Whip within the vanilla extract.
- Beautify the cake: if preferred, use a serrated knife to trim off the rounded tops of each cake to make them level. (if you don’t want to do that, you could additionally simply fill in the gaps with greater frosting.) region the primary layer of cake on a serving plate or cake decorating turntable, and spread the top of the primary layer with approximately ¼ of the frosting. flip the second one layer of cake upside-down (so you have a nice flat surface for frosting), and region it on pinnacle of the first frosted cake layer. Frost it with approximately another ¼ of the frosting. area the remaining cake layer, upside-down, on top of the second one frosted cake layer. cover the complete cake with the ultimate frosting. Sprinkle the last chopped pecans over the top of the cake. Refrigerate until geared up to serve.
