Week 12: Chocolate Rum Cake

Welcome back for Week 12!

We’re (not surprisingly) still in the Chocolate Cakes chapter, and this week’s baking adventure is a Chocolate Rum Cake!

This cake is flavored with dark rum and chocolate, and is described in the Baking Bible as “irresistible to chocoholics” which sounds right up my alley! Let’s get started!

First and foremost, this recipe doesn’t require you to have soft butter, so there were no pesky butter chunks (just like Week 10). Second, this recipe calls for dark rum, and I ended up using Captain Morgan Black Spiced Rum. If you have a favorite dark rum, just go ahead and use whatever kind you want.

There are a few extra steps to making the batter for this cake, so if you’re in a bit of a time crunch, I might not suggest this recipe. The first step is melting chocolate pieces (again, I just used semi-sweet chocolate chips) and butter in a double boiler, which is easy peasy.

After that, you have to whisk dark muscovado sugar and egg yolks together until creamy. This was a little challenging considering dark muscovado sugar is a little hard to break up, so I had to take extra care in making sure all the troublesome little clumps were gone. Remember, you can use dark brown sugar if you don’t have dark muscovado lying around!

After those two mixtures are complete, you mix them together along with the rum, flour, and ground almonds. I decided to use all-purpose flour instead of self-rising flour to see if that helped it not sink. Again, my food processor has a hard time getting things into a finely-ground powder, so I had a few small almond pieces left floating around, but I assume it’ll add a nice texture to the final product.

The last step before the oven is taking egg whites and whisking them until they have stiff peaks. This means that you whisk the egg whites on a high speed until they’re light and fluffy, and when you pull the whisk or beater out of the eggs, it stays in a nice little peak and doesn’t fall back in on itself. You add this mixture into the batter, gently folding it so you don’t lose the air you just whisked into the eggs, and then it was time to bake! The batter was thicker than I expected, but still easy to spread in the baking tin.

The recipe calls for 45 minutes in the oven, but after checking it at 35 minutes, it was almost done! I ended up leaving it in for another 2 minutes and then I took it out to cool. Thankfully, we had another week of no cake sinking – yay!!

The filling/icing was really easy to make! It was essentially the same process as melting the chocolate for the batter. Chocolate, butter, double boiler, done! The recipe does call for apricot jam to be put on the top of the cake, but I didn’t have any on hand, so I just didn’t use it. It does also tell you to cut the cake in half for two layers, but mine was pretty thin, so I just skipped this step.

This recipe does have an optional chocolate ganache recipe if you wanted to add a little oomph to your decoration, and I decided to try it! It’s another mixture with a double boiler and chocolate, but this ganache also has egg yolks, single cream instead of butter, and more rum – yum! The ganache is meant to be thick enough to pipe on the top of the cake, and mine thankfully turned out okay! Remember, single cream is basically just half & half, so you can use that instead!

Overall, I’d give this recipe a 3/5! The recipe was easy to follow, and although it takes a little longer to complete, I’d definitely make it again. The cake itself had more of a brownie texture than cake texture, which I wasn’t expecting, but it was moist and had a nice chocolatey taste. You could definitely taste the rum, but it wasn’t overpowering, and the almonds added a nice crunch. The bottom of the cake did end up being a little crunchy, similar to a more well-done brownie, but it was a nice base for the rest of the cake, so I wasn’t disappointed with that.

I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I’d definitely suggest a thinner layer of the filling/icing. It was delicious, but it was a little bit too much. The ganache though (which is different from the filling/icing) was delicious and I’ll be using more next time!

I do suggest giving this cake a try if you’re a fan of chocolate and rum, just make sure you set aside enough time to finish everything!

That’s it for week 12, the Chocolate Rum Cake! Thank you for following along with me, and, again, if you have any questions, feel free to use the “Get in Touch” feature on my “About Me” page and subscribe to get updates on posts!

See you next week!