Hummingbird Cake

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A great Southern classic, Hummingbird cake is a sweet, thick, and fruity treat. By using just a few simple ingredients, and some really good cream cheese frosting, you make a perfect, moist and delicious cake every time with very little effort!

Make sure to make your own Best Cream Cheese Icing for this recipe. Or, if you want a different cake recipe, try making this Classic Chiffon Cake instead?

Hummingbird Cake

Originally a Jamaican dessert, Hummingbird cake is all about plenty of rich, juicy fruits put into a decadent and moist cake and topped with some great cream cheese icing.

Make sure to get some good nuts for this recipe, as although it is primarily a fruit cake, the nuts contribute so much extra flavor and crunchy body that you don’t want to skip them.       

Hummingbird Cake Ingredients

Make sure you look at the recipe card at the very bottom for the exact amounts so that you know exactly what to buy for this recipe.

Icing

• Batch and a half of The Best Cream Cheese Icing  

Cake

• All-purpose flour

• Granulated sugar

• Baking powder

• Baking soda

• Ground cinnamon

• Salt

• Eggs

• Vegetable oil

• Mashed bananas

• Pecans

• Crushed Pineapple (with juice)

• Vanilla extract

How To Make Hummingbird Cake

• Prepare your batch of The Best Cream Cheese icing and set aside

Cake

• Grease and lightly flour three 8-inch cake pans and set aside

• Stir together the flour, sugars, cinnamon, baking soda, baking powder, and salt with a whisk, and then set aside

• In a large bowl, combine the oil, eggs, pineapple, and juice, as well as the mashed bananas, vanilla extract, and nuts

• Add the flour mixture to the wet mix, and then stir to combine

• Pour the batter into the three prepared pans

• Bake in a preheated oven set to 350 Fahrenheit, or until a toothpick inserted into the center of each pan comes out clean

• Remove from oven and allow to cool completely on racks

• Remove the cakes from the pans once the pans are cool to the touch

• Frost with the cream cheese frosting between the layers, and then frost the sides and the top of the cake

How To Best Decorate The Cake

This Hummingbird cake is actually pretty simplistic in its recipe – it is really just a standard cake batter with some pineapple juice and vanilla extract and plenty of extra fruit and nuts.

However, the thing that makes this cake unique is its decoration and design. It needs just a little bit of attention to detail to really make it stand out as a Hummingbird cake.

• To decorate, take your pecans and slice them into halves. While you could just use the whole pecans without slicing them, it could create a bit too much thickness and bite in every mouthful of cake, so you want to halve them first.

• Place the halves along the base of the cake, as well as around the top of the cake to create a ring. You want it to look a bit like a pecan crown forming over the top of the cake as you decorate.

• After that, chop up a few extra pecans into a sort of rough chop and sprinkle those pecan shards all around the top.

This will create a combined layering effect, as well as help to give you lots of different textures and bites with every mouthful. 

Do You Need To Use Pecans For This Recipe?

Hummingbird cake pretty much always calls for pecans, both because it is a commonly available nut in Jamaica and the South but also because it works really well with all of the other flavors in the cake.

However, not everyone likes pecans or can even eat them, to begin with.

If your problem is just the taste of pecans, then you can easily substitute some walnuts instead.

 While walnuts lack some of that nutty brown richness that pecans have, they should still contribute that all-important crunch and crackle that this cake needs.

Make This Nut Free!

If you happen to have a nut allergy, the only thing you can really do is to remove the nuts from the recipe entirely.

If you want to try and replicate that same crunch that the nuts provide, you could try substituting in some crisp apple slices. If you use thin slices of apples along the top of the cake, it might help to contribute some of that pleasant snap that makes nuts so good.

Make sure you are keeping an eye on your moisture content, though – adding in apple slices is necessarily also going to increase the overall moisture of your cake.

Looking for more delicious Cake recipes? Try these out:

• Sour Cream Coffee Cake

• Apple Dump Cake

• Sweet Potato Cheesecake

• Angel Cake

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