Hummingbird Cake

Here's a failed cake. Failed because nobody liked it. Not myself or my friends who came for coffee. Thing is, it didn't taste bad other than being too sweet and that's after half the sugar was reduced. I give it a 6.5/10. It just wasn't something people would want to eat a second slice of and that is bad for a cake.

I've never eaten a hummingbird cake before and Saveur's list of layer cakes are bookmarked for times when I feel like baking, which is not very often these days because there's now only 4 of us at home, and all of us are trying to whittle our waistlines. Cakes, I've always said, are one of the worst things to eat. Sugar. Butter. Flour. Cream. Only the eggs make some nutritional sense. I would advise eating cakes only on special occasions such as after a fight with your hubs. Preferably over his mom. I'm speaking generally.

The hummingbird cake is a Southern US cake. Southern cakes are real cakes (not those fluffy airy commercial nonsense you find in Asian bakeries) made with real butter, nuts and lots of sugar and they must be at least 4 layers high, or they won't match the big hair of those Southern belles.

I don't know why the cake is called hummingbird because hummingbirds are not one of the ingredients (Su's daughter Sash asked if they were; valid question).The hummingbird cake is nearly like the carrot cake except bananas are used in place of carrots. The texture of thi! s cake i s dense,slightly stickybut not heavy and is surprisingly moist. Somehow the combination of bananas, pineapple, pecans, cinnamon, cream cheese--all the things I love-- and a ton of sugar didn't work for me. It's strange because I love carrot cake and that's only a carrot away from a hummingbird cake. By the second spoonful, I was reminded of cough syrup. It was the cinnamon powder I think. This cake just overloads on everything.

Never mind, if I didn't try I wouldn't have known. Next up, I must make that other Southern cake that I've wanted to for years. The coconut cake. I have high hopes for that one.

For the recipe, go here. I made 1/3 of the recipe and reduced the sugar by nearly half, which means 1/2 of 1/3 recipe which made a cake with a sweetness level just about right for me. However and although I made only 1/4 of the frosting so that the frosting layer was thin, it made the cake too sweet. I can't imagine how horrible the sweetness will be if I didn't reduce the sugar in the cake and the amount of frosting. It makes me suspect that most recipes online have not been tested and brings me back to what I prefer, true and tried recipes by home cooks. Another thing. I think self-raising flour would make a lighter cake for this cake. Not too light but not as sticky-dense as this one. Oh, and another thing about the recipe. It says to bake the cakes for 50 minutes. That's way too long because the batter is divided among three cake pans, giving a thin 2 cm batter. My cakes took only about 30 minutes to bake.