Rum Banana Cake

What would you cook or bake with a bottle of rum? When my bro and I came back from our trip to Cuba, immediately we thought of making a rum cake. We were searching online for a rum cake recipe and we can tell you that finding a recipe made all from scratch was weirdly difficult. We were quite surprised that most of the online recipes are shortcut version which utilize packaged cake mix and instant pudding mix like the one on Allrecipes.  I don't know about you, but for us, it doesn't feel right using premixed packages; it feels somewhat like cheating. I guess as an amateur baker, we are sort of obliged using basic ingredients for baking.

We finally manage to find a recipe from Southern Living which does not contain any premixes, but we did have to tweak it a lot according to what we have at our disposal. For instance, banana liqueur is one of these ingredients which will end at the top shelf of my pantry and never will be used again. Why not simply use ripe banana? Also, to reduce the fat content, we substituted whipping cream for low-fat yoghurt.

We were quite happy of the final results when we flipped the cake onto a plate. If you are big fan of banana bread, you will love this. The cake was very moist and flavorful. The flavor improves if the cake is left overnight.

Makes 1 cake
Inspired from Southern Living
Preparation Time: 20 mins
Baking Time: 60 mins
Printable Recipe

Ingredients

1 1/4 cup butter, softened
1 cup brown sugar
4 eggs
4 very ripe bananas, mashed
2 tsp vanilla extract
1/2 cup dark rum
3 cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
3/4 cup low-fat yoghurt

Procedure

1. Preheat oven to 350F. Grease a bundt cake mold.

2. Using an electric mixer at medium speed, beat butter and brown sugar until smooth.

3. Add in one egg at a time. Mix well after each addition.

4. Beat in mashed bananas, vanilla and rum.

5. Sift flour, baking soda, baking powder and salt. Gradually fold the dry ingredients into the batter with a rubber spatula.

6. Fold in the yoghurt into the batter.

7. Transfer batter to greased pan.

8. Bake for 60 mins or until it passes the toothpick test.

9. Cool for 15 mins, flip the cake out onto a large plate. Serve.