How To Make A Hummingbird Cake

Step 1: You will need

I'm going to show you how to make a simple cake - a hummingbird cake - which is flavoured with ripe banana, sweet pineapple, and then it's spiced with vanilla and cinnamon. The ingredients we have here is some plain flour in this one, sugar, eggs, bicarbonate of soda, a little bit of salt, and oil is the fat that goes into it - sunflower oil. Now the first thing to do is to take your ripe bananas - as you can see this is a very ripe banana - and peel them, chop them up, and put all the banana into your food processor.

If you haven't got a food processor you can just mash the banana up and chop the pineapple up and mash that through as well. So we'll take the pineapple and again chop it up into the blender. And pulse it up it doesn't matter - it doesn't have to be a completely smooth puree because if it's not it's going to have a bit of a texture and you're going to see that in the cake and I like that kind of thing.

The next step is to take your dry ingredients and pass them through a sieve into your mixing bowl. Again if you don't have an electric mixer all of these steps can be completed by hand. So the flour goes in and the sugar.

Okay, and then we're going to put our salt, bicarbonate of soda, and finally the cinnamon, all goes into the mixer. Now we'll take our vanilla pod, with vanilla pods the softer they are the squishier they are the more scent you get off of them the better they are. Split it open and then scrape out the seeds from the inside.

Take these seeds and push them into your cake mix. Okay, we're going to take our puree banana and pineapple and mix them into the dry ingredients. Once all the components are ready on this one it's a really easy cake to put together.

Crack in your eggs. So crack in your eggs and they're all in and then fix the paddle onto your machine. And again start it on a low speed.

And very quickly the ingredients will come together. Keep mixing it and then slowly pour in your sunflower. It's that easy to make.

Okay, this mixes enough to put into two loaf tins like this or you could make a round cake if you wanted to as well. Just with strips of baking parchment just line your tin in a crisscross. So you know it's going be easy to pull it out once the cake is cooked and then you just pour your mix in.

Don't want to fill it up too much, leaving room for the cake to rise. That's it. And then they're ready to go into the oven for 170 degrees for about an hour to an hour and twenty minutes.

So our hummingbird cake has come out of the oven and it's been checked and it's cooked all the way through - the knife came out and it was clean. So we're just going to lift them out and so we lift them out and just take the baking paper off. Okay, and they'll cool down and be ready to serve in about an hour or two. Okay and so the hummingbird cake is cooled down and we can slice it now and this would make a lovely addition to an afternoon tea party.