Tortuga Rum Cake

Back in January of this year, my friends Mike and Carol went on a cruise and brought back some amazing rum cake. This lead me to search for a copycat recipe. This cake was super moist and loaded with rum. I'd never had rum cake before and as far as I'm concerned, I don't need to try another kind ever again.

The recipe I used for the copycat is borrowed from another blog called Meemo's Kitchen. Here's the link to the recipe if you want to try it yourself.

Get yourself all of the cake making essentials. You know, butter, salt, eggs, sugar, cake flour, vanilla extract, instant vanilla pudding mix, vegetable oil, walnuts, and baking powder. On top of that, you're going to need about 1 cup of Tortuga Gold Rum. I bought a handle of it since I'll probably make this more than once. Who am I kidding, I'll probably drink it too.

Preheat your oven and finely chop your walnuts. I love my kitchenaid for little things like this.

Thoroughly coat your bundt pan (or angel food pan in my case) with cooking spray. I used Pam for Baking because I hate the smell of canola oil and PfB smells amazing. Take the chopped nuts and coat the bottom of the pan and set it aside.

On to the cake. Cream the butter and sugar. Add in all of the other cake ingredients. Mix slow to get everything wet (that's what she said), scrape the sides of the bowl a couple of times and then mix at medium speed until you have a really smooth batter. Pour it into the prepared pan and smooth out the top so the batter is even.

I really ought to check the temperature output of my oven. The cake was supposed to cook for 55 minutes but I think it took close to an hour and 20 minutes before the toothpick came out clean. Here's a little sneak peak.

When the cake is done, you'll want to set it on a wire rack for cooling and immediately start the rum soaking glaze. For that, you need some water, sugar, butter and Tortuga Gold Rum. Bring the water, butter and sugar to a very light boil. Reduce the heat and simmer until the sugar is dissolved and the mixture becomes slightly thicker. Don't forget to stir occasionally. Burnt sugar doesn't taste good.

Remove from heat and add the rum and stir until it's all blended up good. Pour the hot glaze all over the cake. It may not soak in all at once so you may have to wait a couple of minutes for it to absorb before you pour the rest of the glaze on.

Cool the cake completely before turning out onto a plate. The cake is pretty delicate and once you turn it out, you want be able to move it around too much. You might want to turn it out directly onto your cake carrier or whatever you plan to serve it on.

Here's what mine looked like after cooling on the rack for a couple hours.

Looks like an awesome snack for after football practice this morning. Bring your forks.