What The Hummingbird Bakery Cake Days Actually Is
It's a cookbook by Tarek Malhas and Natalie Havins, the two people who opened the original Notting Hill shop. The book collects recipes from their second location and some that evolved after they left the bakery altogether. It covers cakes, biscuits, breads, and a handful of things that aren't sweet. The tone is straightforward. No theatrical presentation. I picked up a copy around 2014 and have used it as a reference more often than my own handwritten notes. The recipes are dependable. Some of them require techniques that will trip you up the first time if you're not expecting them.
Where to Find The Hummingbird Bakery Cake Days
The book is widely available through standard retailers. Amazon, Waterstones, W.H. Smith, and the publisher's site all carry it. You can also find used copies for reasonable prices on eBay or in secondhand bookshops. There isn't a legitimate free digital version from the publishers, so any site claiming to offer a PDF download is distributing pirated material. I wouldn't bother with those. The printing quality on recipe sites that scrape the book tends to be poor, pages get cut off, and formatting breaks. The book is organized by type: sponge cakes, butter cakes, fruit cakes, cheesecakes, biscuits, and breads. Each recipe includes a yield, prep time, and bake time. The instructions assume you have basic equipment and know the difference between a whisk and a balloon whisk. They don't hold your hand through that. One thing beginners miss is that the gram measurements are primary. The volume measurements (cups, tablespoons) are provided but can be off by a meaningful margin depending on how you pack flour. I always weigh ingredients when I'm making anything from this book. It cuts down on the variables.
Here's a practical problem I ran into with the Victoria Sponge recipe. The instructions call for creaming butter and sugar until pale and fluffy, which the book describes as taking roughly eight minutes. In my kitchen, with a stand mixer at medium speed, that consistently took closer to twelve minutes because of the ambient temperature. My butter was straight from the fridge on a cold day. The cake turned out dense the first time I didn't account for that. The workaround was simple: I let the butter sit on the counter for twenty minutes before starting, and I switched to a slightly lower mixer speed to avoid incorporating too much air too quickly. The result was noticeably better on the second attempt. Another nuance worth noting. The recipes frequently call for room-temperature eggs. This isn't just a suggestion for texture. Cold eggs shocked into creamed butter will cause the mixture to curdle, and it's hard to recover. I keep a bowl of warm water nearby and drop the eggs in for five minutes before I start mixing. It takes negligible time and prevents a ruined batter.
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Recipes That Actually Shine
The Carrot Cake is the one most people know from the bakery. It's solid but not magical compared to other carrot cake recipes you'll find. What surprised me more was the Salted Caramel Cake. The caramel layer inside is genuinely good, and the method for making it from scratch is clear enough that you don't need a separate guide. The Chocolate Fudge Cake is also reliable, though the icing can set up faster than you'd expect once it's off the heat. Work in smaller batches if you're icing multiple tiers. The bread section is shorter but useful. The Banana Bread recipe produces something closer to a cake than a traditional loaf, which is consistent with British banana bread. If you want an actual yeast-leavened bread, look at the Ciabatta attempt. It works, but it requires patience with the fold-and-rest cycle. I've made it three times and each batch took about four hours from start to finish including the bulk fermentation.
What Doesn't Translate Well
Some of the decorative techniques assume you have access to fondant paste and experience rolling it out thin without it cracking. If you're a beginner baker, skip the decorated cakes section and focus on the straightforward frosted options. The photos in the book are styled for publication, not realism. A cake that looks perfectly smooth in the images usually took the baker an hour of smoothing and re-smoothing to achieve. Also worth mentioning: several recipes use UK self-raising flour, which has a different protein content and leavening agent distribution than US all-purpose flour with baking powder added. If you're substituting, the ratio matters. I use 150 grams of plain flour plus 2 teaspoons of baking powder per 200 grams of self-raising flour called for. It's close enough for most applications in this book.
Bottom Line
The Hummingbird Bakery Cake Days is a functional cookbook with recipes that work as written if you pay attention to temperature control and measurement method. It's not innovative in technique. It's not trying to be. The value is in the reliability and the fact that the recipes have been tested in a commercial kitchen environment before being printed. For home bakers who want dependable results without spending years developing their own recipes, it's a reasonable investment. Just buy the physical book or an authorized ebook. Skip the sketchy download sites.
