Hummingbird cake with pistachios

My hummingbird cake is slightly tweaked from the original. Still beautifully easy to make, it has buttercream frosting decorated with pistachios. No middle layer – the cake is sweet and indulgent without it.

Why is it called ‘hummingbird cake’? I don’t think you feed it to the namesakes, even less probable that it’s made OF them. There seems to be a jostle between southern US states and Jamaica, both claiming the fame of the cake’s origins. All the southern recipe sites describe it as a southern gem, specialty and classic but apparently it was a PR gimmick from Jamaica sent to the US in a tourist-enticing campaign. Considering the doctor bird, a spectacularly colourful species of hummingbird, is the national symbol of Jamaica and inhabits nowhere else, the Caribbean roots sound more convincing.

The classic (Jamaican or otherwise) is a ‘bucket’ type of cake (throw everything in a bucket and mix) made with crushed tinned pineapple, mashed bananas, pecans and layered with cream cheese frosting. That’s all very well but tinned pineapple? in the Caribbean? The things GROW there. Do the Napolitanos use tinned tomatoes for their pizza sauce? The only explanation might be in the export value of the cake recipe – tinned pineapple is a staple in the US I imagine, also less accustomed is the thought of making a cake with fresh fruit and the hassle of crushing the pineapple would probably kill the appeal of the ‘easy’ recipe.

It certainly appealed to me and I’d baked it several times with enthusiasm following Joy of Baking recipe. But at some point I started tweaking because the thing is, any cake that has bananas added to the mix tastes like banana bread, no two ways about it. And as much as I love it, I wanted the hummingbird to hum with the pineapple more. I skipped bananas.

Then there was the issue of cream cheese frosting which is common as muck, and there’s hardly any variety to it. As for buttercream on the other hand, you can let the reigns of your fancy go loose and I had planned to try out the fresh apple buttercream variant. Plus, apple – pineapple – geddit?

And finally, I don’t like pecans that much. And hummingbirds are more colourful than the boring brown so pistachios seemed much more fitting. And there we have it: my version of the hummingbird cake is purely pineapple, with buttercream for frosting topped with pistachios. And if I may say so myself, it’s hummingly gorgeous.