Forget Banana Bread And Mix Up A New Sweet Treat Inspired By A Famous Jamaican Dessert

Only a small handful of years ago, homemade banana bread saw a resurgence in popularity. This return to home-baking coincided with the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, and Google searches for banana bread recipes increased exponentially during the early weeks of the nationwide period of lockdown. Relatively simple to bake, banana bread gives you an excellent way to utilize leftover produce in the form of a conveniently loaf-shaped sweet treat. 

If you want to shake things up, our frosted hummingbird bread offers a new twist on this sweet bread. The recipe is inspired by the hummingbird cake, a delightful confection with roots leading back to 1960s Jamaica. Appropriated by southern American states and popularized as a "classic" of the culture, hummingbird cake is a rich and flavorful dessert featuring bright tropical flavors in tribute to its island roots.

Albeit texturally different from more traditionally dense Jamaican baked goods, hummingbird cake, also known as "Dr. Bird cake," is named for the national bird of Jamaica. The recipe was created and distributed by the Jamaica Tourist board around the late 1960s in an effort to share information about the island's tropical fruits. It prominently features popular produce of the islands (specifically banana and pineapple), along with chopped walnuts or pecans, and a generous portion of warming spices and flavors such as cinnamon, nutmeg and vanilla. The light and spongy dessert is topped off with a decadent cream cheese frosting. All together, it's a delicious mixture of tastes and textures, which can be easily translated into a banana bread-style loaf cake.

There are many simple tips for making the best banana bread, and giving your loaf the Dr. Bird cake treatment is an impressive way to elevate the classic sweet treat. In fact, it's even easier than making a full-sized hummingbird cake. As with any standard banana bread, making a frosted hummingbird bread is a matter of gathering the ingredients — mixing the dry and wet separately — and then combining everything together before folding in the chopped nuts and shredded coconut, and spreading the batter into a pan to bake in the oven. The main notes of a hummingbird cake that distinguish it are the tropical fruits, nuts, and spices, all of which allow you to draw inspiration from the islands to liven up any standard banana bread recipe.

Simply adding pineapple and coconut to banana bread creates a great combination of tropical fruit flavors. Similarly, you can start with a fluffy sweet potato banana bread recipe and add nutmeg and vanilla alongside the requisite cinnamon to draw upon the spice blend of the Jamaican treat. Consider dressing your hummingbird loaf cake with a lighter vanilla glaze if you want to skip the heavier cream cheese frosting. Choosing your favorite elements of a hummingbird cake to combine with your best banana bread recipe is a wonderful upgrade to a classic dessert.