When papa pig's away.. the mouse can come out to play! YAY!
And today's the day! la-la-la-la...
I have a sweet tooth, but most recipes are still way too sweet for my liking. I don't know about you, but I always find cakes tasting a little sweeter the next day! So I'm going to do it MY WAY (^^)
After comparing a few recipes online, which called for 400-450g/ 2 cups of sugar (?!!), I just knew I had to reduce the sugar! After all, the bananas and pineapples are already sweet enough! We don't want to die of a sugar overdose, do we? (I know you'd be pleased, papa pig)
So this is my take on the hummingbird cake...
Hummingbird Cake (my Way)
375g self-raising flour
250g caster sugar
1 tsp cinnamon
a pinch of salt
3 eggs, beaten
1 cup / 250ml sunflower oil (next time, I'm using melted butter)
300g undrained pineapples, crushed
4 large / 400g bananas, mashed
1 tsp vanilla extract
Cream Cheese Frosting
250g cream cheese
55g butter
250g icing sugar, sifted (next time, reduce to 200g)
1 tsp vanilla extract
50g chopped and toasted walnuts
Preheat oven to 180 degrees Celsius.
In a bowl, mix crushed pineapples, mashed bananas and vanilla extract together.
Combine flour, sugar, salt and cinnamon powder. Add eggs and oil to the dry ingredients.
Then stir in the pineapple and banana mixture. DO NOT BEAT mixture.
Pour into 3 - 8 inch pans and bake for 30 minutes.
Leave to cool before frosting.
One recipe suggested poking some small holes into the cakes (before frosting), and sprinkling some pineapple juice into the cake so that it will be nice and moist. I did.
So how did my adaptation turn out? Well, it worked.. cake tastes nice, banana-ey, cinnamon-y and moist. Nice texture too. However, if I were to make this again, I might replace sunflower oil with butter. There's nothing like the taste of butter in freshly made cakes! I love BUTTER.
This is also one of the rare (very) times, I ice my cakes. I've never liked frosting. I like my cakes the way it is. I think frosting dulls the flavor and camouflages the wonderful aroma of the cake, blah, blah... Truth is I don't know how to ice cakes, I just slap them on! But since baby pig have been wanting frosted cakes FOREVER, I'm going to make him happy today!
As you can see I'm really terrible with frosting (><). I've never successfully frosted anything! Anyways, the cream cheese frosting is awfully sweet in my opinion, and it really camouflaged the taste of a really nice cake. I'm going to skip the frosting next time, or find another recipe! By the way, the original cream cheese frosting recipe calls for 2 times the sugar! Yikes!
Anyways, fatty hubby likes this cake. He actually said it's good.. and that's saying something else! He is usually non-committal with an 'ok'.. I'm not sure if he's just pulling a fast one.. but I'm happy.
Baby, big and mama pig really, really like this cake too. Even the frosting. Baby and Big had seconds! And you know what, happiness is... THIS!
It's a happy day (^^)!
Cake's really GOOD!
p.s if you've been a good boy, papa pig.. we might save you a slice!
