During the Lunar New Year of 1988, Selena Wong wanted to create a special dessert for her family in Kingston, Jamaica. Ms. Wong, whose ancestors came to the island from China in the 19th century, was a self-taught baker who occasionally sold goods from her home.
Knowing the importance of lychees to the Chinese Jamaican experience, she made a light sponge cake that featured the canned lychees and their syrup. “I was riffing on the idea of strawberry shortcake, which has always been popular in Jamaica, even though strawberries aren’t native to us,” she said.
Her creation, which she simply called “lychee cake,” was a hit with her family, and, within a few years, a national obsession was born. The cake has become one of Jamaica’s most popular desserts, sold in grocery stores and pastry shops and by home bakers. It has even emigrated from Jamaica to become a cultural staple in cities with large Jamaican American enclaves, like Miami.
In the United States, lychee cake remains very much the bailiwick of Caribbean home bakers. In 1978, Kay Chen, 84, emigrated from Jamaica to Miami to operate a Blockbuster video franchise. Before that, Ms. Chen, also a descendant of late-19th-century Chinese immigrants to Jamaica, was a seamstress, flower arranger, beautician, nightclub owner, restaurateur and beauty queen, crowned Miss Chinese Jamaica in the 1950s.
But, like many Caribbean women, she turned to baking for family and friends for extra money, making a variety of desserts — black cake, pone, ambrosia and, of course, lychee cake. A favorite among her customers, she considers a “special occasion cake,” she said, while in the middle of making a double-size one for a funeral.
Nikki Stultz, who once sold lychee cakes out of her Miami home, is now considering continuing that work in Marietta, Ga., where she recently moved. “One year, I sold 300 cakes in the holiday season,” said Ms. Stultz, whose family also emigrated from China to Jamaica in the late 1800s.
Lychee remains one of the ingredients most associated with the descendants of Chinese immigrants, who first arrived in the Caribbean in the early 1800s as contract workers or indentured laborers to work in sugar cane fields mostly in Cuba, Jamaica and Trinidad. Emigration from China continues today, leaving an indelible impact on local foodways.
“This became a favorite cake for my mother’s birthday in the last 15 years of her life,” said Virginia Burke, author of the cookbook “Eat Caribbean,” about the region’s cuisine. Ms. Burke, who is not of Chinese descent, recalls eating canned lychees over vanilla ice cream in Jamaica’s Chinese restaurants as a child.
Although lychees trees were transported to Jamaica from China in the 18th century, the fresh fruit isn’t used in the cake. The reason, said Ms. Burke — and confirmed by Ms. Wong — is that the trees have a fickle bearing cycle, which makes them expensive.
“Plus most Jamaicans wouldn’t give up the pleasure of eating fresh lychee out of hand,” Ms. Burke said.
Elise Yap, proprietor of the The Blue House Bed & Breakfast in Ocho Rios, Jamaica, which serves lychee cake for its weekly Chinese Jamaican night, agrees that lychee is what she calls a “crave” for Jamaicans. Her adopted father’s Jamaica Ice Cream Company created a lychee ice cream in the 1940s.
Ms. Stultz, the home baker, says, “I think this cake is popular because it’s so fresh.” Like many lychee cake bakers, she keeps her particular recipe secret. “It feels like a simple cake, but it’s really not,” she said. “It’s tricky to get the sponge light and to whip the cream so it holds.”
Back in Jamaica, Ms. Wong credits lychee cake as starting what is now her successful pastry business. Also known for her elaborate wedding cakes, she recently opened a dessert shop called the Bakery in Kingston, and created the wedding cake for the Hulu series “Black Cake.”
“I’ve made lychee cake for prime ministers, actors, musicians,” said Ms. Wong, whose shop sells the cake by the slice. “It’s become a very special cake for Jamaicans.”