Rum Rum Rum!

We are in the middle of the birthday extravaganza month of April which usually happens to include Easter.  Ack!  

My birthday is the 1st of April and I made myself a dessert of a cookie base with melted semi sweet chocolate over it and York patties and York Pieces over all.  It was good!



My daughter's birthday is April 7th and I made brownies for dessert.  Brownies with York Pieces in them.  Wow!  Really yummy.  The brownies were from a mix, sadly, but darn it if the Betty Crocker GF brownie mix is not really really good!  I found out that the York Pieces are GF after talking to someone over at Hershey's for a while.  I basically made the brownie mix as usual and added York Pieces.  Simple.

Today is my daughter's birthday event with the whole family which includes my parents and my sister who happens to be in town.  We are heading to The Columbia, a Spanish restaurant and the first restaurant in Florida.  This particular location is not the oldest but you get the picture.  The Columbia has a very good GF menu including all the Paella they make.  Yummy!  

After dinner we are heading to my parents house to visit and eat the cake I made.  Rum cake, rum filling and rum frosting.  I used 1/4 of a bottle of rum, half a bottle of rum flavoring, two packages of the Betty Crocker yellow cake mix, a container of Cool Whip, a box of vanilla instant Jello pudding, six eggs, 3/4 of a pound of butter and lots of powdered sugar.

The Betty Crocker cake mix indicates that for an 8 x 8 pan cook for 36 to 41 minutes and an 8 or 9 inch round pan to cook for 41 minutes.  OK wait, ONE cake pan?  Did I read that right?  I thought, NO way, and poured out the batter into three smaller cake pans, maybe 7 1/2 inches diameter.  Yeah, well, the cake cooked perfectly and rose to about 1/2 inch.  OK I guess they were not kidding with the whole ONE cake pan thing.

I looked at the little skinny cake layers for a day and decided to make another box and another three skinny layers.  MUCH better.

The filling is made from one box of Jello pudding mix, which is GF, a cup of milk and an 8 oz container of Cool Whip.  That's it.  Oh well, of course there's the actual rum and rum flavor in there, too.  This is between all the layers.  Here is what the cake looked like with the six layers and the filling:

                  Note the rum bottle.


I also used actual rum and rum flavoring in the cake itself.  I used 1 teaspoon of vanilla and 1 teaspoon of rum flavoring.  The rum itself?  Well, since the recipe calls for water, I added some rum instead of some of the water.  Maybe 3 tablespoons.

The frosting is made with one stick of butter and lots of powdered sugar.  The key to making a good butter cream is to keep mixing the powdered sugar into the butter.  You want fine crumbs.  Use a fork.  When in doubt, add more powdered sugar.  Once you have crumbs add the flavoring, I used , umm, RUM!  Add small amounts of half and half and keep mixing with the fork.  You want to only add small amounts of the cream at a time.  The frosting may be lumpy from the powdered sugar so keep on beating it now with a spoon. There you go!

Here is the finished cake.  It reaches to about 1/2 inch of the lid of the container!

                                     yummy!!