Gluten-Free Rum Cake #Recipe by @LibbyKlein #Father'sDay

 Libby Klein My husband loves rum. He was in charge of liquoring the fruitcake last Christmas and the end result had to be eaten with a spoon well away from an open flame. So for Father's Day, I thought this would be the perfect dessert for him. I've seen versions of this that include the use of Coke-Cola, but I went traditional. There is so much you can do with this recipe. Add a little lemon or lime zest. Maybe some Maraschino cherry juice. Or Pineapple and coconut. It makes a good jumping-off point for just about any cocktail-infused cake you can think of. Just keep the liquid amounts the same. What would you add to make the perfect cake for yourself or your loved ones?

Gluten-Free Cuban Rum Cake

Ingredients

For the Cake:
2 cups granulated sugar
½ cup unsalted butter softened

½ cup vegetable oil
3 cups gluten-free flour 
4 large eggs room temperature
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1 teaspoon salt
1½ teaspoons baking powder
½ cup heavy cream
¾ cup Rum – I used Bacardi gold

For the Buttered Rum Sauce:
¼ cup unsalted butter
¼ cup granulated sugar
¼ cup light brown sugar 
¼ cup rum 
¼ cup heavy whipping cream 
2-3 dashes Angostura bitters optional
1 pinch salt

Directions

For the Cake:

Preheat oven to 325F. Grease a (10- to 15-cup) Bundt pan with baking spray or butter and flour it.

Combine gluten-free flour, salt, and baking powder in a large bowl then whisk together.

In the bowl of a stand mixer, beat butter, oil, and sugar, on medium speed until light and fluffy, about 5 minutes. Add eggs, one at a time, beating until combined after each addition. Add vanilla, beating just until combined.

With the mixer on low, add flour mixture alternating with rum and heavy cream, beginning and ending with flour mixture just until combined.

Pour batter into pan and bake for 65 minutes or until a wooden pick inserted in the center comes out clean. Let cool in the pan for 15 minutes. Invert onto a cool rack and let cool completely. Glaze-cooled cake with half of Buttered Rum Sauce. Serve with remaining sauce.

For the Sauce:

Melt butter in a small saucepan over medium heat. Add remaining ingredients, stirring until fully combined. Bring to a boil. Boil, stirring occasionally for 4-5 minutes. Transfer mixture to a heat-proof bowl or measuring cup; let cool to room temperature, stirring occasionally. Use immediately or store chilled in an airtight container for up to 1 week. Warm slightly before using.

Gluten-free baker Poppy McAllister and her aunt Ginny are looking forward to a quiet, homey Christmas at their B&B in Cape May, but unfortunately, death isn’t taking a holiday this year . . .

Ever since Thanksgiving, Poppy and her pals have been left with an unsolved mystery of the romantic kind. But at least this mystery isn’t the kind that involves murder. That all changes when the body of a fish supplier is discovered in the kitchen of her ex’s restaurant—and he’s frozen, not fresh.

For once, it’s not Poppy who tripped over the corpse, yet she can’t escape being drawn in since the victim has a note taped to him reading Get Poppy. Figures—an engagement ring isn't labeled, but the dead guy is addressed to her. Now, while Aunt Ginny plans a tree-trimming party and pressures Poppy to decode a mysterious old diary, the amateur sleuth is asked to “unofficially” go undercover at the restaurant to help the police. Until then, the only crime Poppy had been dealing with was Figaro’s repeated thefts of bird ornaments from the tree; now it looks like it’s going to be a murder-y Christmas after all.

 

Libby Klein grew up in Cape May, NJ where she attended high school in the '80s. Her

classes revolved mostly around the Culinary sciences and Drama, with one brilliant semester in Poly-Sci that may have been an accident. She loves to drink coffee, bake gluten-free goodies, collect fluffy cats, and translate sarcasm for people who are too serious. She writes from her Northern Virginia office where she serves a very naughty black smoke Persian named Sir Figaro Newton. You can keep up with her shenanigans by signing up for her Mischief and Mayhem Newsletter on her website. www.LibbyKleinBooks.com/Newsletter/

Rum Cake Revisited by Maya Corrigan

For many years my company dessert was rum cake. I think the original recipe appeared on the label of a Bacardi rum bottle. I can’t remember whether my mother or my mother-in-law was the first to try it. The three of us baked it regularly because it was so easy. The recipe, using yellow cake mix as its basis, always turned out well. But times change and so did the size of cake mix boxes. So today I’m sharing a rum cake recipe modified for the smaller size of today’s mixes.

Today's cake mix boxes contain approximately 3/4 of the amount that boxes did years ago. So in revising the recipe, I used three eggs instead of four. To decrease the pudding, I measured what was in the entire box and subtracted a quarter from it. Next time I'll use the whole box. The only result of using another tablespoon of pudding mix would probably be a slightly sweeter cake. Today's cake mix boxes contain approximately 3/4 the amount that boxes did years ago. So in revising the recipe, I used three eggs instead of four. To decrease the pudding, I measured what was in the entire box and subtracted a quarter from it. I left out less than a tablespoon of mix. Next time I'll just use all of it. The cake might be a smidge sweeter but otherwise the same.

The original recipe called for a rum glaze, which adds quite a bit of sweetness and increases the alcohol. These days I rarely add the glaze. Occasionally, I’ve iced the cake with cream cheese frosting for a birthday celebration. Without the glaze or the icing, it makes a fine not-too-sweet cake for tea or dessert.

Ingredients

1 yellow or vanilla cake mix, formerly 18.5 oz and now 15.25 oz
1 package of instant vanilla pudding, still 3.34 oz
3 eggs
1/2 cup cold water
1/3 cup vegetable oil
1/2 cup dark rum

1 cup of chopped pecans or walnuts (optional)

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees.

Grease and flour a 10-12-inch tube or Bundt pan. If using nuts, spread them on the bottom. Set the pan aside.

Combine the cake mix, pudding mix, water, oil, and rum in a large mixing bowl. Beat the mixture on medium speed for 2 minutes and then pour it into pan.

Bake at 325 degrees for 55-60 minutes until golden brown and the cake springs back when touched.

Cool the cake on a rack for 10 minutes and invert it onto a serving platter. 

Rum Glaze 

If you want to glaze the cake, add it after the cake has cooled for 10 minutes and you've inverted it. 

Ingredients

4 Tablespoons butter
1/2 cup sugar
2 Tablespoons water
1/4 cup dark rum

Melt the butter in a small saucepan. Stir in the sugar and water. After the mixture boils, stir it constantly for 5 minutes. Then add the rum and stir again.

Prick the cake all over with a toothpick. Spoon or brush the glaze over the top and sides little by little. If the glaze pools at the bottom, spoon it over the cake again until the cake has absorbed all the glaze. 

Do you have a reliable dessert that you often make or do you prefer to try new recipes? 

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Back in Print! The first Five-Ingredient Mystery!

The paperback version of By Cook or by Crook has not been available for a while, but now there's a new printing. So if you want to start the series with the initial book, you can order it from your favorite bookstore. Large retailers list the second book, Scam Chowder, as unavailable in paper form. However, there are still printed copies available. Please e-mail me (maya.corrigan at gmail dot com) if you want the paperback and I'll direct you to an independent bookseller who has one. All the titles in the series, including those two, are available as ebooks. 

Maya Corrigan writes the Five-Ingredient Mysteries featuring café manger Val and her live-wire grandfather solving murders in a Chesapeake Bay town. Maya lives in a Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C. Before writing crime fiction, she taught American literature, writing, and detective fiction at Northern Virginia Community College and Georgetown University. When not reading and writing, she enjoys theater, travel, trivia, cooking, and crosswords.

Visit a mystery fan fest in the latest Five-Ingredient Mystery

Val and Granddad attend a mystery fan fest that features a bake-off between contestants playing the roles of cooks to fictional sleuths. As Nero Wolfe’s gourmet chef, Granddad competes against Sherlock Holmes's landlady Mrs. Hudson, played by Cynthia Sweet. Granddad blames her for ripping off the five-ingredient theme of his Codger Cook newspaper column to use in her own recipe column and cookbook. When she’s found dead in her hotel room with a whistling teakettle next to her, he and Val sort through the festival-goers to find the one with the biggest beef against Ms. Not-So-Sweet.

• Visit my website for easy recipes, mystery history and trivia, and a culinary mystery story. 
• Sign up for my newsletter. One subscriber wins a free book each time I send a newsletter.
• Follow me on Facebook.

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A Wedding, A Murder, and My Mama’s Rum Cake

A very warm welcome to Virginia Lowell. This is Virginia's first visit to Mystery Lovers' Kitchen. She writes the Cookie Cutter Shop Mysteries. Several of us on this blog love cookie cutters, and I know some of you do, too! We're so pleased Virginia could join us!


I’ve been thinking about cakes lately.

Of course, cookies are always the tasty treat du jour at The Gingerbread House, where Olivia Greyson and her best friend, Maddie Briggs, bake and decorate cutout cookies daily. They also sell everything from antique cookie cutters to sparkling sugar sprinkles. As if all that doesn’t keep them busy enough, Livie and Maddie are about to tackle their fourth Cookie Cutter Shop mystery in ONE DEAD COOKIE, due to land in bookstores on July 2.

However, Livie and Maddie are also preparing for a major and, they fervently hope, murder-free event. (They can hope, can’t they?) Maddie is getting married! Hence my current obsession with cakes.

Lately, I’ve been happily reminiscing about cakes I have known and loved. Aside from my own wedding cake (amaretto, with crystallized violets; need I say more?), I’d have to say that my favorite cake memory comes from my childhood. My mother made a killer rum cake. Now, everyone knows the classic rum cake recipe—you know, the one that starts with a yellow cake mix. My mother, being a cook of the 1960s, used mixes whenever possible, so she latched on to that rum cake recipe and never let go.

Over time, my mom made minor adjustments to the rum cake recipe, such as using a glaze without nuts in it. Then one day she decided to create a rum cake that would be remembered with delight and awe for decades to come. My father, sister, and I watched as Mom used a fork to poke holes in the top of the finished cake, right through the glaze. We felt a tingle of foreboding when we noticed the maniacal glint in her eyes. Mom picked up the bottle, which still held several inches of rum, and unscrewed the top. Was she planning to take a swig right out of the bottle? Nope. she upended that bottle and poured most of the remaining rum over the cake.**

This was the most popular cake my mother ever served. I was allowed only a small taste, but it was memorable. To this day, the very sight of a bottle of rum makes me smile.

**If you try this at home, I’d advise putting the cake on a large plate with sides. And maybe don’t empty the bottle, especially if there’s more than about a cup of rum left in it. That part of the experiment has been done, and it wasn’t pretty. Deliriously funny, but not pretty.

                              Mom’s Double Rum Cake

Cake:
1 package yellow cake mix
1 package vanilla instant pudding mix
4 eggs
½ cup cold water
½ cup oil
½ cup rum

Mix together the above ingredients and pour into a tube or bundt pan. Bake at 325°F for one hour. Cool in pan for ten minutes. Invert onto a serving plate (with sides). Prick tiny holes all around the top of the cake.

Glaze:
½ cup butter
¼ cup water
1 cup sugar
½ rum

Melt butter in saucepan and stir in water and sugar. Boil for 5 minutes while stirring constantly. Remove from heat. Stir in rum. Brush glaze over top and sides of cake. Wait for glaze to absorb, then repeat until the glaze is used up.
*Mom’s minor addition: Pour or spoon additional rum over the cake and let it set a spell.

Maddie plans to serve her wedding cake at a huge engagement party, so everyone in Chatterley Heights will have a chance to sample it. I can guarantee the cake will not be rum soaked, though it promises to be creative and tasty. It might even feature cookies; you never know. Drop in at Maddie and Lucas’s engagement party to find out. But be careful. A murderer might be lurking in the crowd.






About Virginia:

Virginia Lowell lives in Minnesota with her husband and two cats. The cold winters have driven her to baking cookies, just to keep warm. She grew up in a small town inhabited by an unusual numbers of quirky people, who hardly ever murdered anyone.

One Dead Cookie, the fourth book in Virginia Lowell’s cookie cutter shop mystery series, releases July 2. The first book in the series is Cookie Dough or Die. She is currently working on the fifth book in the series, which is published by Penguin/Berkley in 2014. Find out more about Virginia on her website:   www.virginialowell.com.  You can check in with Olivia Greyson, Maddie Briggs, and other folks from Chatterley Heights at killercharacters.com on the 24th of each month.

Rum Cake photo by Kent Wang, Wikipedia Commons