Rum-Drenched Vanilla Cakes

This week’s Tuesdays with Dorie recipe was selected by Wendy of Pink Stripes. She chose the Rum-Drenched Vanilla Cakes. This is a seemingly simple loaf cake, infused with vanilla and rum. You can get the complete recipe on Wendy’s blog.

This recipe calls for dark rum, but I didn’t have that at home. I’m not much of a drinker at all, but when I think of rum I think of a trip my husband and I took to Vancouver, BC. We were out for dinner and it was Bellini night at the restaurant. We were on foot (which is often the case when we are on vacation) so we figured we would give them a try. My husband got a Bellini that came with a shot of pineapple rum. Wow, was that fantastic! I hadn’t ever been that interested in rum, but after that I was a fan. I didn’t have pineapple rum at home, but I had coconut rum and I used that instead.

I halved the recipe, but I made the entire recipe of the rum syrup. I used a vanilla bean for the first time and it wasn’t too hard. I see people use vanilla beans on television, so I knew how to work with it. I thought about adding some shredded coconut to the batter, but I decided to keep it simple. I used to have a lot of problems with loaves baking all the way through, but that wasn’t a problem with this cake. I used almost the full recipe of rum syrup on just one cake, so mine is very moist and the rum flavor shines through.

Recipe from Baking from My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan, pages 226 and 227