Somebody asked me for the recipe before I'd even set the cake carrier down on the dessert table. I hadn't cut it yet. She was going on the smell, banana and cinnamon and toasted pecans, and on the frosting, which was a little dented on one side where Jack's thumb had ridden along in the back seat.
Our church has a covered-dish dinner in the fellowship hall after the Easter service, and the dessert table is its own event. Hummingbird cake was made for it. Banana, crushed pineapple and pecans in a spiced oil batter, three tall layers and cream cheese frosting: it's the cake you bring when you want people to talk about it. Granny June's copy is a magazine clipping from 1978, yellowed and taped to an index card, with a note in her handwriting at the bottom: "Good. Heavy. Feeds 20."
Why a heavy batter sinks
Heavy is the trouble. The test cake I baked the week after spring break sank in the middle as it cooled, until it looked like a shallow bowl. Here's why. A cake holds its shape once the flour and eggs have set into a firm structure around all those little air bubbles. A wet batter loaded with fruit and oil takes longer to get there. If you pull it when the edges look done, the center is still soft, and as the steam inside cools and shrinks, the soft middle has nothing holding it up, so it falls. Too much fruit makes the whole problem worse.
My new card, filed behind Granny's, has three fixes on it. Measure the banana in cups, not in bananas: my test cake had five enormous ones, close to 3 cups mashed instead of 2, and that was most of the problem. Use the small 8-ounce can of pineapple and don't drain it, because the recipe counts on that juice as part of the liquid. And bake until a toothpick in the very center comes out clean, not with moist crumbs. My thermometer reads about 205°F in the middle when it's there.
Ingredients
- 3 cups all-purpose flour
- 2 cups sugar
- 1 teaspoon baking soda
- 1 teaspoon cinnamon
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
- 3 large eggs, beaten
- 1 cup vegetable oil
- 1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla
- 1 can (8 ounces) crushed pineapple, undrained
- 2 cups chopped very ripe banana (about 4 medium), measured
- 1 1/2 cups chopped pecans, toasted and divided
- For the frosting: two 8-ounce blocks cream cheese, cold; 1 cup (2 sticks) butter, softened; 2 pounds powdered sugar; 2 teaspoons vanilla
How I make it
- Heat the oven to 350°F. Grease and flour three 9-inch round pans and line the bottoms with parchment.
- Whisk the flour, sugar, baking soda, cinnamon and salt in a big bowl. Add the eggs and oil and stir by hand with a spatula just until everything is moistened. No mixer needed.
- Stir in the vanilla, the pineapple with its juice, the banana and 1 cup of the pecans.
- Divide among the pans and bake 25 to 30 minutes, until the tops spring back, the edges pull away from the pans and a toothpick in the center comes out clean. Don't open the oven door before about 22 minutes.
- Cool 10 minutes in the pans, then turn out onto racks and cool completely.
- For the frosting, beat the butter until smooth, add the cold cream cheese and beat just until combined, then add the powdered sugar a cup or so at a time and the vanilla. Stop as soon as it's smooth; overbeaten cream cheese frosting turns runny.
- Frost between the layers and over the top and sides, then press the remaining pecans on top.
Nora did the crumb coat. She learned that move on her birthday cake in February and now she won't let a layer cake leave the house without one, which I fully support.
Make-ahead: bake the layers a day early and wrap them once they're cool. The frosted cake keeps three or four days in the refrigerator, and it's honestly better on day two, when the fruit has evened out the crumb. Because of the cream cheese frosting it rides to church in a cooler and goes back into one if it's been out on the table close to two hours. If pecans are out of reach, walnuts work, or leave them off the top.
The whole cake cost about $22, with the pecans and the cream cheese doing most of the damage. I cut it into 20 slim slices, like Granny's card said, so that's about $1.10 a slice. The carrier came home empty except for a few crumbs and Jack's verdict: nine out of ten, minus one because "pineapple in a cake is suspicious." He ate two slices of the suspicious cake.
