Amplify Boxed Spice Cake Mix With A Few Tablespoons Of This Dark Liquor

Looking to spice up your baking routine? There's no better way to do so than by making your best ever spice cake. And you don't need to spend a day doing it from scratch. There's a simple trick that can take a humble boxed cake mix into dreamy, gourmet territory: dark rum. 

When writing about the best liquors to add to cake mix, expert and restaurant kitchen veteran Joshua Carlucci calls dark rum "a baker's secret weapon." Dark rum is aged, commonly in charred oak barrels. Together with its base ingredient of molasses, this results in notes of caramel, tobacco, dried fruit, woodiness, vanilla, baking spices, coffee, and/or cocoa. Both similar and complementary to the flavors in spice cake, dark rum's flavor profile bolsters and balances any mix, while providing richness and a full, rounded depth to the finished bake. 

Choose your own adventure when incorporating dark rum. Two to three tablespoons right into the batter ups the cake's moisture and creates a caramelized flavor. Or, you could make a rum glaze by mixing the liquor with confectioner's sugar, then brush that onto the cake after baking and slightly cooling it. Again, you get moisture, richness, sweetness, and complementary flavors. Of all the different kinds of rum, dark rum is the winner for spice cake. Spiced rum can be a little too matchy-matchy with spice cake's notes, creating overpowering, one-dimensional flavors; while white and gold rums are too light and tropical. Dark rum is a perfect happy medium.

Spice cake is a step up in complexity from other cakes, especially perfect if you like a little more balance to your sweet treats since those spices bring in everything from heat and richness to earthiness and nuttiness. It's no wonder spice cake has been a home baker's go-to for decades — did you know the first ever Betty Crocker cake mix was a spiced ginger cake mix, back in 1947? But once you have spice cake made with dark rum, you'll feel like you're trying it for the first time — and there's no going back. 

There is going bigger and better, though. A couple of tablespoons of rum in cake batter or a rum glaze drizzled onto a cake is heaven, but there's room to get creative, too. You could make your own buttercream frosting with dark rum, for example, simply by adding a splash of the spirit into that mix. A dark rum frosting would go perfectly with a warm, moist, spicy, and sweetly fruity spiced apple cake. 

Because you're saving time by using a cake mix rather than starting from scratch — which no one will be able to believe based on the mouthwatering finished bake, by the way — you can have fun with extra touches at the end. Think about toppings that fit into the overall flavor and aroma profile of the spice cake and dark rum. Try chopped, toasted nuts; dried orange peels; dark cherries, apricots, or dates; or a sprinkle of cinnamon, nutmeg, and ginger.