Retro Hummingbird Cake

Studded with pineapple chunks, bananas, crunchy pecans, and coated in a tangy cream cheese frosting, hummingbird cake is an opulent dessert that’s been a mainstay of Southern tables since the 1970s. Though hummingbird cake is an American classic, it hails from Jamaica and is also known as the Dr. Bird cake—its name is a nod to the island’s national bird, who locals refer to as Dr. Bird. Writing for Epicurious, Riaz Phillips notes that the cake gained popularity after the Jamaican Tourist Board distributed a recipe to local newspapers to promote the island’s local bananas and pineapples. 

“The cake itself is the height of mid 20th century post-colonial tropical flair,” Phillips writes. “Bananas and pineapples are blended into a sponge that’s enhanced with spices like vanilla, nutmeg, and cinnamon—ingredients that are almost an afterthought today, but were still relatively novel at the time.” The recipe made its way to America, where some home cooks nicknamed it “The Cake That Won’t Last Long” because, well, it was so delicious that it never did. Its popularity soared after Southern Living published a reader-submitted recipe for the cake in 1978, and today, the 45-year-old recipe remains one of the magazine’s most popular recipes of all time.

When Serious Eats asked our colleague Nicole Hopper, a seasoned recipe developer, to create a new hummingbird cake recipe for us, we knew we wanted it to be true to the original. But we also wanted to pack in as much sweet banana and pineapple flavor as possible without being cloying or stodgy, as some hummingbird cakes can be. Hopper delivered, with a simple, delicious cake that gets a big tropical kick from mashed and chopped bananas and crushed pineapple, with fragrant toasted pecans for crunch and a tart cream cheese frosting to balance the sweetness of the cake. I’d happily have a slice of it—frosted or unfrosted—with a cup of coffee every afternoon if I could. 

Hummingbird cake is relatively easy to whip up, but the tips below will help you make a phenomenal one each time. Just don’t be surprised if it disappears quickly—with not a crumb left behind—when you serve it to guests. It is, after all, the cake that won’t last long.

Tips for Preparing Hummingbird Cake

Use bleached cake flour. High protein flours tend to develop more gluten, resulting in sturdier, tougher baked goods. While this is great for bread, it’s not ideal for a cake in which you want a tender crumb. With a lower protein content than pastry flour and all-purpose flour, cake flour produces a light and fluffy crumb, making it our go-to flour for hummingbird cake. (Former Serious Eats editor Stella Parks has written at length about the science behind bleached cake flour.)

Overripe bananas are your best friend. The riper the banana, the sweeter it is. As the fruit matures, its starches convert into sugar, developing rich notes of caramel, honey, and pineapple. Ripe bananas are easier to mash, too, which makes prep much faster and easier. Look for speckled fruit with brown or black patches. If your banana could pass for a giraffe, you’re on the right track.

Mash—and chop—your bananas. Most hummingbird cake recipes call for just mashed bananas, but we wanted chunks of banana dispersed throughout, too. We experimented with just chunks, but the fruit wasn’t evenly distributed and the batter lacked the tropical notes that mashed banana brought. The solution? Using both mashed and chopped bananas. It’s the best of both worlds, and ensures you get banana flavor in every bite.

Go for the canned pineapple. Fresh pineapple contains bromelain, an enzyme that can break down proteins. This spells bad news for glutenin and gliadin, two proteins that serve as the building blocks of gluten. As the cake bakes, the bromelain eats away at the gluten proteins, resulting in a stodgy crumb. Canned pineapple doesn’t have any active bromelain, as the process of heating the pineapple to 158ºF (70ºC) deactivates the enzyme. To prevent your cake from baking into an unpleasantly heavy brick, use canned crushed pineapple in lieu of fresh.

Toast your pecans. To bring out the sweet, delicate flavors of pecans, toast them briefly on a baking sheet in the oven until they’re golden brown and fragrant. The nuttiness adds another layer of flavor to the cake, and complements the sweetness of the fruit.

Keep the cream cheese frosting simple. Cream cheese frosting is a must for hummingbird cake. For this recipe, we beat cream cheese, unsalted butter, confectioners sugar, a tablespoon of reserved pineapple juice from the can, and vanilla extract together. Spread generously between the layers and over the cake, it provides a tangy contrast to the cake’s tropical flavors.

Take the internal temperature of the cake. Bakers typically gauge the doneness of their cakes with a toothpick, cake tester, or by lightly pressing the top of the cake to see if it springs back gently. Because hummingbird cake is so moist and packed full of fruit and nuts, it can be difficult to tell when it’s done with those traditional methods. The most reliable way to see if the cake is ready to come out of the oven is to take the internal temperature of the cake with an instant read thermometer. Look for a temperature of 200ºF (93ºC).