the family rum cake

I haven't made a rum cake in a while. When I tried before, I didn't have access to our family's secret/sacred recipe. Well—that's changed.

I couldn't immediately find a Bundt pan that fit my small oven, but I found a tube pan, purchased a few years back, that barely fit it. This is why the hole in the center makes the cake look as if it were someone's prison bitch. The rum-cake recipe is one that has been in our family since I was a kid; my brother David is the keeper of the original, now-yellowed sheet of paper on which the recipe had been printed back in the late 70s or early 80s, onto which our mom had jotted down some handwritten notes. A month or so ago, David finally sent me a photo of that sheet, and I copied the info (revisions, too) into a Google Docs document. For years, David has been the "keeper" of the cake recipe, making tons of cakes that he would send out to friends around Christmastime. I don't know that I'll be doing anything like that, but now that I have the recipe for myself and have baked a first-draft cake with it, I might want to bake a few cakes to send to some of my own peeps.

out of the oven, drizzled with rum-butter sauce, then cooled for two hours before removal

Since this is a trial cake, I took a sample despite knowing I shouldn't.

soaked in rum-butter sauce

a closer look at how soaked the cake is

Overall, I'd say the cake's taste was about 90% of the way to being what Mom used to make. The outer surface, though, had a bit of a strange aftertaste. At a guess, it's because I greased the tube pan with regular cooking oil instead of either Crisco (shortening, which I don't have) or softened butter. The liquidy oil kept dripping to the bottom of the cake pan, so any almonds I tried to sprinkle on the pan's inner surface would migrate to the bottom as well. So I threw most of the almonds out and left the clingy stragglers in.

Since I'm going down to Masan to visit my buddy Neil this weekend, I had thought about taking the cake down with me in the form of boxed-up slices. Because this is a rum cake, though, it's a bit "adult" in flavor, so I don't know how much Neil's son might like it (or is he already into alcohol?). But now that I've sampled the cake and know about that weird aftertaste, I can't take it down with me to inflict on Neil's family. So later today, I'll make my almost-keto chocolate-chip cookies and take those down with me tomorrow.

Note to self: don't grease your cake pan with cooking oil. Use butter or shortening. And you'll need to buy more rum if you're making a second cake.