Shine Supper Club: Hummingbird Cake

Serendipity at it's finest!

I've already mentioned my stockpile of frozen bananas before. My mother suggested I make a hummingbird cake, so I already had planned on making one. Then the Shine Supper Club announced that this month would be summer desserts. Hummingbird cake is a lightly spiced cake with bananas and pineapple. What could be more summer than that?

My mother's recipe is from-scratch, but calls for a ridiculous amount of oil and sugar. I decided to find a lighter recipe, one that calls for yellow cake mix. I decided to get a little creative and use Betty Crocker Butter Pecan. That way I could also omit the nuts.

The recipe, as follows:

Hummingbird Cake

Adapted from CDKitchen

1 package Betty Crocker Butter Pecan Cake Mix
8 ounces crushed pineapple packed in juice, undrained
1 cup mashed bananas
1/2 cup water
1/2 cup vegetable oil
3 large eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1. Preheat oven 350 degrees F. Spray a 9”x13” baking pan with flour spray

2. Place the cake mix, pineapple with it's juice, mashed bananas, water, oil, eggs, vanilla extract and cinnamon in a large bowl.

3. Blend with an electric mixer on low speed for 1 minute. Stop the mixer and scrape down the sides of the bowl with a spatula. Increase the mixer speed to medium and beat for 2 minutes more, scraping the sides down again if needed. The batter should look thick and the fruit well blended.

4. Pour batter into pan and bake for 30-35 minutes. Let cool completely before icing.

Being a traditional southern cake, the original recipe calls for cream cheese icing. Hummingbird cake is already sweet enough, in my opinion. So I opted for just a half cup of vanilla icing, thinned out with 2 tablespoons of milk and microwaved to form a glaze.

It was as sweet as my mother's recipe, while also not being nearly as dense. The butter pecan mix provided an excellent – though addictive – flavor.

Finally, my freezer is once again devoid of bananas. The thing is, I accidentally bought a 20oz can of pineapple...

Stay tuned later in the week for what I did with the rest of it!