The last ten days of December 2014 have been absolutely crazy. I gave you guys a glimpse of my dessert craziness in the post: Holiday season… Dessert overflow!
Today, I really wanted to talk about one of my best bakes of the season. My Christmas cake – The mammoth task of baking a Rum Cake! A little secret, I don’t like the smell of rum, So we substituted rum with red wine… and the cake to me tasted amazing, and if I could be a little self praising, even better! 🙂
Christmas is not a big thing in our family. But it always gives us enough reason to pamper our sweet tooth. The prep for this cake started early in the morning, mainly because I only thought of baking it at midnight on the 24th. And we had no wine at home to prep the dry fruits ( I am pretty sure we were the first customers of the neighborhood wine shop on the 25th!)
So the task started with collecting all the different kind of dry fruits we had at home, and cutting them into bite size pieces. I must admit, I’ve never seen dry fruits look so colorful!
Colors!
And then came the part where we needed to be patient. Soaking these dry fruits in wine. This was ideally supposed to happen over night. But well… we just assumed over night = 6-8 hours and dealt with it 😀
Once the dry fruits were fully soaked… (I have to be honest they smelled divine, but super potent!) I started the process of making the batter. I followed the recipe as per this website: Kerala Plum Cake. I fiddled a bit with sugar quantity as most of the blog recipes have way more sugar quantity mentioned than I can tolerate. Rest all, the instructions were pretty much followed to the T
Here is what the batter looked like, ready to get into the over:
Ready to get into the Oven!
I was very tempted to lick the batter bowl… but I am really scared of raw egg… so refrained.
Another 40 minutes, and staring at the oven every 5mins to see the cake… I finally took this beauty out:
The Cake!
A lot of recipes ask you to pour in the left over Wine/Rum from the soaking process onto the baked cake and resting it for half an hour. But we skipped that, and I am glad we did, as the cake was pretty moist in itself.
Moist
This has to be one of my best bakes! I absolutely loved baking it, and eating it too. I am never buying a plum/rum cake from the store again!
You can find the recipe here: Kerala Plum Cake
So Justine, This is also my entry for the Tea Time #3! 😀 A little boozy and delicious cake to brighten up the tea time!! Hope everyone enjoys it!! (Pulling out the big guns for my first entry to impress the crowd 😉 )
Mixed Bag 