Your friends and neighbors who arrive home from idylls in the Caribbean usually bring back tans, lame pirate jokes, and rum cakes.
Rum, of course, is ubiquitous in the Caribbean and entrepreneurs long ago learned to add rum to cakes to expand rum’s culinary reach. There are a lot of different rum cakes–some with rum-macerated fruit, some with a good long soak in high octane rum syrup, and some with over-the-top presentations like the triple chocolate rum cake with maple bacon pistachio caramel lattice pictured below. Whew! What a title!
I feel confident that you join me in hoping that “George” appreciated the effort put into that cake. One does have to wonder, though, about the party that must have been going on in the bakery when someone tossed out the improbable idea of splattering that final Jackson Pollock-esque glob of caramel on the side of the cake and topping the whole thing with a maple bacon “fascinator.” But I digress…
There may be no maple bacon on the Caribbean-inspired rum cake recipe posted below, but it is delicious and, might I add, doable without a Cordon Bleu degree (or a whole lot of mojitos). Made with almond flour as its prime ingredient, this cake is called a Tortuga cake. It is soaked briefly in a rum syrup and frosted with a wicked-good vanilla glaze. It is moist and the crumb is perfect. Even a quirky pirate like Jack Sparrow would savor this cake.
Here is the recipe. Hope it shivers yer timbers in the best possible way.
Save RecipeIngredients
- 1 3/4 C. almond flour
- 1/2 C. all-purpose flour (plus more for dusting)
- 1/2 t. kosher salt
- 3/4 C. unsalted butter at room temperature
- 1 C. granulated sugar
- 4 large eggs at room temperature
- 2 T. Myers's Original Dark Rum
- 1/4 C. granulated sugar
- 1/4 C. water
- 1 T. Myers's Original Dark Rum
- 2 T. whole milk
- 1 t. vanilla bean paste
- 1 1/2 C. powdered sugar (sifted)
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 325 Degrees F. Generously grease your baking pan with butter and dust lightly with all-purpose flour or, alternatively, spray pan carefully with oil/flour spray.
- Whisk almond flour, all-purpose flour, and salt together in a medium bowl. Set mixture aside.
- Put room-temperature butter in the bowl of your stand mixer (fitted with paddle attachment). Beat butter on medium-high speed until the butter is fluffy and light-colored. This will take about 3 minutes. Slowly add granulated sugar to the mixer bowl beating until the mixture is light-colored and fluffy. This will take about 4 minutes. Scrape down the sides of your bowl. Add eggs one at a time to the bowl, mixing thoroughly after the addition of each egg. Do not overmix your batter.
- At a medium low speed, add flour mixture to the butter mixture adding about one-third of the flour at a time. Beat for about 15 seconds after each addition of flour and scrape down the sides of the bowl after each addition so that you are sure the flour is fully incorporated into your batter.
- Take 1/2 C. of your batter out of the mixing bowl and, in a small bowl, mix the batter with 2 T. rum. (Be sure to taste the rum at this point to be sure you are using a quality rum. 🙂 Re-taste until you are absolutely sure.) Add the batter with the rum back into the large mixer bowl of batter and mix to combine. Your batter will not be smooth at this point but that is OK. You don't want to overmix it.
- Spoon/pour batter into your prepared baking pan. Tap your filled pan on your counter to settle the batter into the pan. Bake your cake at 325 degrees F. for 42-45 minutes. Your cake is done when you can insert a toothpick into the center of the cake and the toothpick comes out clean.
- When the cake is done, remove it from your oven and set it on a rack to cool. Set the rack over a pan so that you will catch the excess liquid you are about to pour over the cake. While the cake is cooling, pour 3 T. rum simple syrup over the cake. After 10-15 minutes, invert the cake onto a rack and brush with the remaining syrup. Let your cake cool completely. This will take about 1 hour and 30 minutes.
- While your cake is baking, put granulated sugar and water into a small saucepan. Bring the mixture to a boil, stirring occasionally, and boil until the sugar is dissolved. Take your saucepan off the heat and add 1 T. rum. Return your pan to the heat and keep warm.
- Put sifted powdered sugar into a medium bowl. Whisk milk and vanilla bean paste in a small bowl and then whisk the milk mixture into the powdered sugar. If your icing is too thick, add a bit more milk. If it is too thin, add more powdered sugar.
- Pour the vanilla icing over your cake and serve.
This recipe is adapted from one that ran in Food and Wine Magazine. You can find the original recipe in their May 2018 issue.
