Hummingbird cake first took flight in Jamaica as “doctor bird cake,” named after the island’s national bird.
Originally baked in a tube pan and packed with bananas, pineapple, and warm spices, hummingbird cake was created by Air Jamaica and the Jamaican Tourism Board in the late 1960s and disseminated to newspapers in Jamaica and the United States to promote the island’s tropical produce and attract tourists. In 1978, Southern Living in the United States, published a cream cheese–frosted layer cake version from a Greensboro, North Carolina, subscriber, catapulting the dessert to icon status throughout the South.
In this recipe, the cake is returned to its one-pan roots while keeping its tangy cream cheese icing. To “amp up” the fruity flavours, bananas is roasted before folding them into the batter to concentrate their sweetness, the better to complement the tart-sweet crushed pineapple.
An optional garnish of dried pineapple flowers further pushes this bundt toward centrepiece status. The result: a delectable, stir-together stunner that’s perfect for Easter and almost too pretty to eat.
Roasting the bananas before mashing and stirring them into the batter serves a few purposes. First, roasting them evaporates some of their moisture, concentrating the fruity sweetness.
The natural sugars in the bananas also lightly caramelize, which imparts the cake with a unique flavour and complexity. Lastly, because the bananas lose moisture when they’re broiled, you’re able to add more mashed banana to the batter without it making the mixture too wet.