I'll Bake It, You Eat It: Baking Bouchon

I'll give you three guesses what CA said about this cake. You don't need a hint or multiple choice - if you know anything about CA, you know that he wants more rum in the rum cake. Shocker.

There are three applications of rum in this rum cake. There's about 1/3 cup in the cake itself, a few tablespoons mixed with simple syrup to soak the cake and another few tablespoons on the icing. I tried to remind CA of this but he was convinced that it needed more rum.

Of course, when he first ate the cake he sat there for a few minutes hemming and hawing pretending that he wasn't sure what was missing... what could it be? He's such a faker - he knew that I knew that he was going to say it needed more rum so he took his time.

Truth be told, I also think it needs more rum, but I'm not telling him that.

The cake batter contains A LOT of butter - just over four sticks. Yes, four. It's a lot. It also has A LOT of eggs - 2 cups, which is approximately 11 eggs. It's a lot of eggs.

The dry ingredients consist of sugar, flour and almond flour. I was pretty surprised that the ratio of almond flour to regular flour is 4:1 so there is quite a prominent almond flavor to this cake along with the rum flavor.

I was supposed to use Myer's dark rum in this cake. I was hoping that I could find a small bottle of Myer's in the liquor store but I could not and we're not really Myer's rum people so I called CA to see if he thought I could substitute Gosling's dark rum since we already had that in the liquor cabinet. He thought that I could but that it it might have a little less of a deep molasses flavor than the Myer's. I decided to chance it so I didn't have yet another bottle lingering in the liquor cabinet (someday I'll take a picture of our liquor cabinet and all the random stuff that clutters it up so that CA can make his specialty cocktails and you'll know why another bottle is a bad thing).

There was a ton of batter and I was really worried when I put it in the bundt pan because I recently had a very messy incident with my bundt pan. Luckily, this one did not overflow all over my oven. Hooray!

It did, however, totally stick to the pan. Boo!

I haven't used my bundt pan in at least a year and I've used it twice in the last week and both times I've made a mess. The bundt and I are not friends right now.

Good thing I'm persistent so I scraped the broken scraps out of the pan and pieced them back together on top of the cake.

The baked cake gets brushed with simple syrup mixed with rum. In hindsight I think I should have just used rum. It would have amped up the rum flavor and kept the texture of the cake just right. You see, the cake's texture was great - very moist with a great crumb that I attribute to the almond flour. If there were more rum in the cake itself it wouldn't have had the same texture, so putting extra in the soak would help out in the rum department without messing with the texture. The extra sugar in the soak was probably unnecessary because the cake was sweet enough, especially when you add the icing.

The icing is made from powdered sugar, rum and water. When I made it according to the directions in the cookbook, it was way too thick to drizzle so I added a lot more rum which made it perfect.

I really loved this cake, even if I did secretly agree with CA that it could have used more rum. The guys at CA's work loved it too and made no mention of a rum deficiency.