Chocolate Rum Cake

It's time for a special Secret Recipe Club event! This month the event is Holiday Treats! Now that Thanksgiving is out of the way and you likely don't want to see another turkey for the next 11 months, we can move onto December, Christmas and the holiday season.

For this reveal, I was assigned to Daily Dish Recipes which is written by Nicole. Nicole has a lot of great recipes and many of the savory ones kept catching my eye, but I needed to find something sweet for this reveal.

I was looking at the shelf that holds all of our liquor not too long ago and wondering how in the world we were ever going to get rid of it. Neither of us are big drinkers and tend to buy something for a specific recipe and then the rest of the bottle never gets used. So I was eyeing up this shelf and then thought, "I wonder if she has any recipes that use liquor..."

And lo and behold, there was Chocolate Rum Cake, which was perfect. 1: Chocolate and "Holiday Treats" go pretty well together. 2: It used up rum that I probably wouldn't use otherwise. 3: It allowed me to use my bundt pan which collects more dust than it does bake cakes. Total win all around!

Chocolate Rum Cake
Source: Daily Dish Recipes
Servings: 16
Printer Friendly

Ingredients:
for the cake:

• • • 18.25 oz. box chocolate cake mix (any brand is fine)
    • 3.4 oz. instant chocolate pudding mix
    • 4 eggs
    • ½ cup unsweetened applesauce
    • ½ cup water
    • ½ cup white rum

for the rum glaze:

• • 1 cup sugar
  • 1 stick unsalted butter
  • ¼ cup water
  • ¼ cup white rum

Directions:
1. Preheat the oven to 325 degrees. Spray a Bundt pan with non-stick cooking spray.
2. In the bowl of your stand mixer, combine all of the ingredients for the cake and mix on low speed with the beater attachment until fully combined.
3. Pour into the prepared pan and bake for 60 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.
4. Transfer the pan to a wire rack and let cool for 15 minutes. Invert the cake onto a serving plate and continue to cool.
5. Meanwhile, prepare the glaze by combining the glaze ingredients in a medium heavy-bottomed saucepan over medium-high heat. Bring to a boil and allow to boil for 10 minutes.
6. Pour the sauce over the cake and enjoy.

The only change I made to the recipe is I used unsweetened applesauce instead of vegetable oil in the cake. I haven't baked with oils in I don't know how long. Unsweetened applesauce is such an easy substitute and makes the cake incredibly moist. The pudding mix also helps with that and combined with the rum glaze soaking into it, there was no dry or dense cake over here.

I work in a very casual office so I knew bringing in cake spiked with alcohol would be no big deal. I just didn't expect how quickly they would absolutely devour it. I put the cake out around 9 am and when I went back into the breakroom for lunch at 1, there were some crumbs left on the platter and that was it.