Signature Cakes From Around the World Beginning with 'H': Explore Cake Recipe Ingredients!

A harmony of local pride, years of history and an important part of a country’s cultural fabric, cakes are a common dessert in many countries. From warm homemade cakes to those handmade with care in select bakeries, cakes are not the same everywhere. No two cakes taste the same and each country’s local weather, ingredients and the local talent has a lot to do with how they taste, so here are some of the signature cakes from around the world starting with “H”.

1. Hevva Cake

Coming from the Cornwall region of the United Kingdom, Hevva cake is also known as heavy cake and in no way is similar to the Cayman Island cake mentioned below. It is simply made from flour, lard or butter, currants, milk, salt, ginger, and cinnamon. The name comes from the pilchard industry in Cornwall where a lookout on top of a clip or huer, would go “Hevva! Hevva!” to alert fishermen of the shoals of silver sardine swimming below. The huers would bake this simple came once they returned home from work. The “hevva” over time got contorted to heavy, but the cake is anything but heavy.

2. Hot Milk Cake

This cake is an old-fashioned American classic cake that is either prepared as a sheet cake or a layer cake with the simplest of ingredients, usually baked in a tube pan. It of course uses hot milk, hence the name and a generous amount of butter, and whole eggs in the batter. It's quite similar to the English pound cake that gets most of its flavour from the scalded milk. It has a simple sprinkling of sugar on top and doesn't use any frosting. A great cake to eat with your favourite beverage.

3. Hummingbird Cake

Straight from Jamaica, the fruity Hummingbird cake is made with flour, vegetable oil, bananas, pineapple, pecans, eggs, vanilla, sugar, salt, cinnamon, and leavening agents. It almost looks like a cake with its dense texture and cream cheese topping. It is extremely popular in the southern part of the United States but comes from Jamaica where it is called the Doctor Bird Cake, named after the island’s national bird, the hummingbird. For a change, the recipe for the cake was gifted to the US by the Jamaican government in 1968.

4. Huguenot Torte

A popular dessert that graces Charleston's tearooms is this baked apple and pecan or walnut pudding-cake called Huguenot torte. It has a delicious meringue top, with a dollop of whipped cream. Despite its name, the cake does not have French origins nor was it named after the Huguenots. This ramshackle cake is actually a relatively recent creation, with its original recipe being a version of a Midwestern dessert known as Ozark pudding. The recipe first appeared in print in the 1950 community cookbook Charleston Receipts, credited to Evelyn Anderson Florence.

5. Hedgehog Slice

This is not your average cake that bakers try to resemble a hedgehog and the epic fails to make it to social media to be ridiculed. This cake of sorts comes from Germany and is locally known as the Kalter Hund or cold dog. There's a similar version that exists in Malaysia called Batik cake. This cake is made with dense chocolate fudge with crushed chocolate biscuit layers inside that makes for a great sweet snack. This is a popular no bake birthday cake in the country that was popular during 1950-1970. However the cake itself traces its origins back to the 1920s when a German biscuit company manufactured a recipe for a cold chocolate cake featuring the company's shortbread biscuit.

6. Heavy Cake

This cake is a little unusual from the lot because it is made using cassava, a specialty of the cayman islands in the Caribbean Sea. It has earned such a name for a reason for it is dense and moist and sugary sweet because it uses coconut milk, margarine, vanilla, brown sugar, spices, and grated cassava. The cassava is what gives the cake its starch and makes it so dense with added tubers like yams, sweet potatoes. Dry corn is also grated and added to the batter along with local fruits like pawpaw and breadfruit. The cake is firm and has a slight jiggle and with the amount of starchy ingredients, it tends to be sticky.