Festival of birthdays: Hummingbird cake

hummingbird cake

This week every year has always been a festival of birthdays for my family, otherwise known as cake week. It seems like 90% of my family was born at this time of year. We have 9 {yes, NINE} birthdays in just over 9 days. That’s a whole lot of celebrating {and a good handful of nice Pisces people. As my mother-in-law says, we’re swimming in a fish bowl}.

I’m the chief cake maker in my family. Baking soothes me and I love the reaction when people eat good cake, because there’s nothing better than good cake, is there?

I’ll share some of the cakes I’ve made over the coming days/weeks {when I get time to blog!} but today I’m sharing one of the best cakes I’ve made, the Hummingbird cake. It’s like a banana cake, only a little bit fancier/fruitier.

Ingredients

1 x 440g can of crushed pineapple in juice
1 cup of mashed overripe banana {about 2 small bananas}
1/4 cup fresh passionfruit pulp
1 cup caster sugar
2 eggs
150g butter, melted
1 3/4 cups self-raising flour, sifted
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

Method

♥ Preheat your oven to 170 degrees celcius {fan-forced}. Grease and lightly flour a 20cm baking tin, or line it with baking paper.
♥ Drain the pineapple, reserving 1 tablespoon of the juice to use in the icing. Combine the pineapple, banana and passionfruit in a bowl and mix to combine. Add the sugar, eggs and butter and mix again. Add the flour and cinnamon, stir until well mixed through.
♥ Pour into the prepared tin, and bake for 1 hour and 10 minutes. Cool completely and then ice using the recipe below.

Icing

Ingredients

1 x 250g packets of cream cheese
60g butter, softened
3/4 cup icing sugar {I used 1 cup}
1 tablespoon of pineapple juice {reserved from tin of crushed pineapple in cake recipe}

Method

♥ Beat cream cheese and butter with an electric mixer. Slowly add icing sugar, and then pineapple juice. Smooth over top of cake.

Recipe adapted from Taste.com.au

Do you have a festival of birthdays in your family? Which month is busiest for birthdays for you?

Ingredients

Method

13 thoughts on “Festival of birthdays: Hummingbird cake”

  1. Lol. I have three kids, they are all born in the same week in November! Cake sounds lovely 🙂

  2. I have about 20 friends with birthdays in March which makes for birthday bonhomie, near and far! Me, my mum and hubby have birthdays within a week of each other in July which sends us cake crazy! I’ve never made a Hummingbird Cake – I might give it a whirl in the thermomix!

  3. This sounds yummy. I’m in the U.S. & can make the conversions fairly easily, however I’ve got a couple of ingredient questions. What is caster sugar? And is icing sugar what we call “powdered sugar”? Also, I’ve never had fresh passionfruit, do I obtain the pulp by juicing it & then scraping the pulp? I’ve only ever drank passionfruit juice, never eaten one.

    Thanks for your assistance.

    Also, is fan forced what we call convection?

  4. Oh yes, June is our month! My partner, our daughter, his son and myself are all June babies, all two days apart. Aswel as my Step Mum, Niece, Two Cousin’s, Step Sister, Twin Brother and Sister aaand another sister ending the month! My poor parents!!

  5. My daughter is a Pisces–I’ll have to figure out what icing sugar ( confectionary?) is and what castor sugar is Also where I can get Passion fruit pulp in Vermont

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