Hummingbird Cake

Posted on December 29th, 2015

For the past bunch of years, Christmas Eve has been a quiet time for my parents, brothers, and grandparents to go to church and have peaceful dinner before the chaos of the Christmas Day madhouse.  My dad makes a delicious mushroom bruschetta, risotto, and butternut squash, but dessert is always my domaine.

The past few years we’ve indulged in a pound cake.  If you’ve never stopped to wonder how a pound cake gets its name, allow me to enlighten you: it’s because the recipe uses a WHOLE POUND of butter.  Yummy.  We’ve served it with berries, homemade whipped cream, caramel sauce… whatever toppings our little hearts desire.  But this year, I got a little bee in my bonnet and decided this would be the perfect occasion to bust out the hummingbird cake.

Hummingbird cake has a little bit of everything– spices, fruits, and nuts which are protein so this cake is extremely healthy.  Duh.  It also happens to be the most popular recipe on Southern Living of all time, so I felt comfortable giving it a go.

Except…….. I burned the first cakes and had to make them again.  Whoopsie.  Lesson learned.  So definitely check your cakes after twenty minutes.  For what it’s worth, I might also add more pineapple the next time, too, both for flavor and for texture. I also would have loved to throw in a quarter cup of homemade applesauce, too!

In the end, the flavors were delicious.  Because of the range of ingredients, I could see this cake being served at any time of year (ahem, New Years).  With different sprinkles, naturally.  I normally shy away from the effort of layer cakes (bundt cakes are the lazy girl’s dream), but this one was so easy and so worth it!

My birthday may not be for 8 more months… but I already have the recipe all ready to go.