A Recipe for Desire: Hummingbird Cake and Other Ways to Get to Heaven

In my flash fiction piece, “A Recipe for Desire,” which appears in Arts & Letters (Fall 2022), a 12-year-old daughter asks her mother to teach her to make a Hummingbird Cake after a long time of asking. What she’s yearning for is to know the taste of desire.

Now I’m here to tell you this cake is the perfect expression of every desire you ever had and will ever have again. Why is it called Hummingbird Cake? Maybe because it makes you feel that giddy, as light as a hummingbird — it’s that delicious. It’s hardly like cake, more like heaven.

Hummingbird Cake is a fixture for Reveillon, the Christmas Eve celebration as it is done in New Orleans, which is where my character Paulette lives. What she yearns for is to understand why her father doesn’t love her mother anymore. Her story is a spinoff from my novel, “Searching for Persephone.” Paulette will grow up to be a chef extraordinaire, and her recipes run through the whole novel.

So here is Hummingbird Cake, in all of its bliss, straight from my kitchen. Recipe adapted from Jaimie Oliver. One key tool to have is a cake slicer so you can turn two cakes into four layers (all the more room for frosting and brittle). That’s what turns this into a cake about to take flight.