Truth be told, I don’t drink alcohol at all. It’s a personal thing; I don’t begrudge anyone else their drinks. I just don’t partake myself.
To others who cook a lot, I often get an initial reaction of bewilderment. It’s said that there are two types of chefs – those who are alcoholics and those who are in AA. And it is true that there are some liquors out there that give amazing flavors to what they’re paired with.
So, I just bake with them. Between the serving sizes cutting the volume and how much gets baked off, I never have to worry about dealing with alcohol’s physiological effects. I learned this from my mom, who taught me many years ago how to make her holiday rum cake, which was perennially a holiday favorite.
That said, I asked my mom ages ago why she only made it around Christmas, and why only rum. She admitted that she just never thought about doing it any other way. So I decided to experiment a bit on my own.
The process itself is fairly easy, though you do need to tweak your recipes. The problem with alcohol is that it will evaporate faster than water. If there’s nothing to keep the moisture in the cake at all, it’ll dry out. The secret is actually use some variety of custard or pudding in the cake mix (proportioned for the amount of milk used in the recipe). That will trap the water in the milk better, so as to allow the cake to stay moist.
To be fair, there is a downside to this method – cakes will come out denser. That said, when dealing with an alcohol cake, portion smaller, because it will fill you up fast.
Of course, the fun part, once you get the basics down, is that it really works well for multiple types of alcohol… and can be paired with multiple types of pudding. I find that the alcohols like bourbon or rum, where it’s fermented primarily without fruit flavors, work excellent with chocolate or butterscotch. I’m particularly proud of my chocolate butterscotch bourbon cake – I think it’s one of the best I make.
The flip side is that fruity alcohols go great with either caramel, vanilla, or fruity pudding. Perhaps the strangest cake, prior to tonight’s experiments, was a banana cream Midori cake. For all the strange combinations going on in that cake, it came out like a tropical fruit punch in a cake, and it went over quite well.
As for tonight’s experiment? To give you a teaser for next time – bacon cake. Oh yes.