Will Eating Rum Cake Actually Make You Tipsy? Here's What You Should Know

As that first forkful of rum cake hits your tastebuds, it is common to wonder whether or not a slice is enough to make you tipsy. Depending on how it's made, the rum flavor can be very intense, making it seem like a few bites might mean that you need to hand over your keys. Fortunately, while rum cake does often — even after baking — contain some quantity of alcohol, a single serving shouldn't be potent enough for you to notice the effects.

Adding booze to baked goods is a common tradition — and one of the great ways to cook with rum — but between the low alcohol content per serving and the amount lost to evaporation during the baking process, you don't have much to worry about. If you look at our Jamaican rum cake recipe, for example, it contains just a half of a cup of rum baked into the cake. While those four ounces would be a hefty pour, when it gets divided into the 12 servings, it comes out to only about a third of a shot per slice. And when you factor in that about 75% of the alcohol evaporates during the hour-long bake, you're looking at just 8% of a normal shot of rum per serving. You'd have to eat a lot of that cake to get a buzz. Then again, rum cakes are often glazed or soaked in rum syrup, and that can up the ABV a touch.

The method varies between recipes, but it is common practice to further infuse alcohol into the cake by adding a rum glaze or syrup. This increases the alcohol content by some degree, with the specifics depending on the exact practices in the recipe.

If we return to that same Jamaican rum cake recipe, you will see that it is soaked with a rum syrup made with an additional half cup of rum. But we can't just double the alcohol content we figured out for the cake, because while the cake is baked for an hour, the syrup only simmers for 7-8 minutes. This figure is a bit harder to estimate, as the USDA guide regarding alcohol retention in cooked foods starts at 15 minutes of simmering. At 15 minutes, the alcohol content is reduced by 60%. For the sake of simplicity, we'll just use those numbers, and if you're worried, you can just simmer the syrup a bit longer.

Simmering one half cup of rum — four ounces — for 15 minutes brings it down to 1.6 drinks' worth. Divide that by the 12 slices, and you are looking at an additional 13% of a drink per serving. Combined with the 8% in the cake itself, you have 21% of a drink in each slice. It isn't a lot — you'd have to put down five servings to equate to a single shot — but it also isn't nothing. For children, people who are pregnant, and those who abstain from alcohol, boozy desserts are best avoided.