April 8, 2018 – Under an Endless Sky

It all started about six months ago when Dee and Jon asked me to make their wedding cake.

Once we had worked through “eh”, “what?” and “why?” My initial reactions. I carefully explained to them that I had never actually baked a cake before.

They nodded understandingly and said, “yes, but would I do it?”

“We want a traditional Cayman Rum Cake,” they said with the a tone that said ‘it’s our wedding, this is what we want, nothing can go wrong…’ You know part blind faith, part sweet menace. To them this was the reasonable explanation and even some sort of answer to my initial surprised responses.

In life there are time when it is just easier to agree so I said, “Right. OK.”

They seemed happy. They had given me a new challenge all would be well.

So started my cake baking journey.

I began, obviously, by looking for a recipe.

After some searching I found one that I liked:

https://www.texanerin.com/totally-from-scratch-rum-cake/

And credit where credit is due, I can recommend it to anyone as it is a great starting point and a rum cake recipe. If you read Erin’s blog she got the recipe from another site who in turn based it on the world famous Tortuga Rum Cake. It feels a bit like industrial espionage but it’s the recipe was retro-engineered from a real Tortuga Rum Cake and so it has provenance.

http://www.alwaysorderdessert.com/2011/03/rum-cake-from-scratch.htm

Next I went out and bought three bunt tins. One large, one medium and one for cupcake sized cakes (it holds six at a time). Not because I had a plan, but because I had no idea what I needed.

Finally the first lot of ingredients and the cooking began.

A few trials later and I had the basic rum cake turning out pretty well each time. They looked “nice” and tasted really yummy but…

…were they good enough to be a wedding cake?

This of course got me thinking about presentation and how could I make it look special for the bride and groom? After all I couldn’t very well just serve up a very plain-looking cake now could I?

Well Dee’s favourite desert is apple crumble. So, an apple rum cake became the goal.

Jon? Well he likes chocolate and coconut so the idea of the “Bounty Bar” rum cake was born. He also likes beer, but a beer rum cake seemed a bad idea.

It took trial and error. Refining the process each time. Honing the recipes. Testing different rums, more chocolate, less chocolate, different syrup recipes and ways to decorate each cake.

But thanks to the help of a group of dedicated tasters and lots of Sunday afternoon cake tasting sessions I eventually got there and the final recipes were given the thumbs up.

We tried the cakes with tea and coffee and then realised it needed to go with prosecco as this is what it would be served with on the day.

Everyone had to eat a lot of cake but the gang were real sports and put up with it without too much grumbling.

My apple rum cake was the favourite in practice but the Bounty Bar Cake and the Traditional Rum Cake were real hits as well.

That just left the cakes for the big day!

Typically it had all been going so well but on the day of the final bake my big tin just stopped working! The cakes just kept sticking to it and refusing to come out, fortunately my medium-sized tin and my cup cake tin seemed to be working just fine so with a little bit of redesigning I managed to pull it together… but not before the process permanently traumatized my mum. 😱

The cakes looked really nice and everyone said they tasted great. It felt like a real achievement to go from having never really baked a cake to making cakes that really looked and tasted the part.

I was asked several times where I had bought them and whether or not they were Tortuga Rum Cakes! By chance one guest worked for Tortuga and he was convinced it was one of theirs!

High praise indeed! And evidence that the DNA of the recipes came from a Tortuga cake.

But most importantly the bride and groom were happy. A success. Job done! I could retire from the cake business.

But no.

It turns out that I have been bitten by the baking bug and so I have continued to experiment and innovate with rum cakes.

This week two more creations have joined my recipe book.

The ‘Jaffa Cake’. A chocolate orange rum cake glazed with marmalade.