Booze and baked goods? What is not to love?

Hey Val's cookbook fan club and faithful blog readers, I'm Laura, and I will be your guest blogger today. I enjoy cooking and baking, but I don't actually own any cookbooks. This is because I am too cheap to buy one and I haven't found one with a title like, "1,000 Delicious Recipes for the Lazy and Poor Student", if you find a cookbook like that please let me know. Both the recipes I made I found online.

The first one, Bacardi rum cake I made a month ago. It was ridiculously easy. Pretty much you add instant pudding and rum to a cake mix. The glaze was a little bit tricky. The version I made was a very strong, like people were getting tipsy off it strong. So I would recommend not flooding your cake with glaze, even if it smells really good. Depending on your taste, you might want to not add quite so much rum to your glaze. I made a slight alteration to the recipe by adding walnuts (the extras from what I added to the bottom of the bunt pan) and butterscotch chips on top of the glaze soaked cake. I highly recommend using as many walnuts and the butterscotch chips, it really works well with the rum flavor. I shared this with a group of people during our failed trip to stargaze. It seemed to go over very well, even if it was sticky/messy. The cake stayed really moist (note this is the only context I use the word "moist") and smelled much better than I would have expected from a rum cake. I think the vanilla, butterscotch and rum smells really blended together to encourage maximum sugar and alcohol consumption.


The second cake I made is a mixture of two different recipes for Bailey's Irish Cream Cake. I used this one for the batter, because I wanted to make the chocolate version of this cake. Bailey's vanilla cake just seemed wrong. Although, now that I am writing this blog I realized I used a full cup of Bailey's (based off a different recipe I had open on my web browser, good job me). I think this explained why it took so long in the oven. I used this version of the recipe to make the frosting. I wasn't sure how many cups of powdered sugar equal 1lb of powdered sugar. The Internet wasn't too helpful. So I trusted in trial and error and ended up sticking with 3 cups of unsifted powdered sugar. I think it was a good balance of sweet but not overpowering sickly sweet. Then I added some mini chocolate chips. I don't even know if I could taste the mini chips, but they made the cake look really cute, so worth it in my book.

This cake ended up being such a hit that my very Republican friend requested it be made for his birthday. So being the faithful Obama supporter that I am, I used mini chocolate chips to spell out "HOPE & CHANGE" on the birthday cake. I think the birthday boy was pleased anyway.

Yes we can!