Posts tagged hummingbird

I haven’t baked in a while due to vacation and then since returning I’ve been busy busy busy. I skipped Zumba last night because I was feeling under the weather* and was looking forward to staying home and baking instead. I wanted to make birthday cupcakes for a friend (Chris) at work who’s birthday was in mid-April and I was glad to have the time to finally do it. Because I was so late on these cupcakes I asked Chris exactly what he wanted and said I would make whatever his request was.

Chris told me to exemplify himself in a cupcake (sorry if that’s not grammatically correct). This was quite tough for me because I could have thought about it a lot of different ways. I almost went with Mexican Chocolate Cupcakes, but then remembered a recipe I had seen before on sweettoothed. She talks about Hummingbird Cake + a recipe, here. (If you don’t already follow her on tumblr, I highly recommend checking her out). Now I didn’t use her recipe, although I’m sure it’s fabulous, because I already had one in one of my cupcake books.

They were kind of more like muffins, but I really like them.

I was really worried about overflowing the cupcake liners, because the recipe said to only fill it 1/3 of the way, so I think I under-filled them, but only a little bit.

I made a cream cheese frosting, similar to what I usually make, but the butter was too hard so I forced the softening of it (microwave) and I used less powered sugar than usual, so it’s SUPER CREAMY. But still quite yummy.

So what’s the deal with the hummingbird business?

I guess a Hummingbird Cake is a very popular southern treat that was first referenced in print in the 1970s that has pineapples, pecans and bananas in it. Different things I read by googling it have sourced it to Jamaica, as the hummingbird is one of their national symbols. 

Why do these cupcakes symbolize Chris? I’m going to leave that open to interpretation. 

*Don’t worry, I washed my hands an EXTRA amount. I did however wake up feeling much worse and had to take my first day off of work this year due to sickness, so the cupcakes are sitting in my fridge.