A rum cake is a delightful, easy addition to any festive table. The sponge, spiked with rum, is baked in a Bundt pan and drizzled then brushed with a syrup also containing rum. This results in a cake so moist and rich that it requires neither glaze nor frosting. Enjoy it with a cup of coffee or as a perfect end to a celebration day. However, if you’re avoiding alcohol, ignore claims that all alcohol evaporates during the baking process. Spoiler — it doesn’t.

Alcohol usually acts as a carrier for the flavor a certain recipe requires, be it a delicious rum cake or a red wine sauce for steak. It also enhances the taste of other ingredients, like in a penne alla vodka, where vodka brings out the flavor of the tomatoes and tenderizes the meat. Alcohol is such a versatile ingredient with plenty of applications, but keep in mind, although a large portion of the alcohol does cook off, it’s never 100% gone.

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When cooking with booze, it’s impossible to fully evaporate all the alcohol from a dish or dessert. The remaining alcohol in the final product depends on several factors, primarily temperature and cooking duration, as well as your cooking dish’s surface area. Alcohol evaporates quicker at high temperatures, and more cooks off the longer the dish bakes. However, alcohol molecules will always bond with other molecules in the dish and stay put. Studies have shown even after prolonged cooking, a little alcohol will always remain in the dish.

It’s crucial to take into account the size of your cooking vessel when preparing rum cake. A larger pan or skillet provides greater surface area, thereby facilitating more oxygen contact, which leads to faster alcohol evaporation. You should consider the kind of ingredients used and what specific dish you are preparing. For instance, a rum syrup drizzle used to garnish a rum cake probably hasn’t been cooked long enough, or at the right temperatures, to evaporate significant alcohol amounts. On the contrary, the cake itself usually contains between half to a full cup of rum, which results in a cake that has roughly 5% alcohol content- equivalent to a bottle of beer!

While not all dishes may contain as much alcohol as rum cake, there could be several reasons for omitting alcohol from your dishes, including health, recovery, or religious reasons. But this doesn’t mean you should feel excluded from scrumptious boozy bakes. There exists plenty of ways to replace alcohol in a recipe that demands it, with the focus being on the flavor, rather than the alcohol. Endless options of achieving similar flavors without using alcohol abound, such as using various types of vinegars, herbs, spices, and syrups. Cooking and baking ingredient swaps can be an excellent way to achieve this.

To create a rum cake, consider using rum extracts and rum-flavored syrups or a blend of ingredients like white grape juice, molasses, and almond extract. Another option is seeking out non-alcoholic rum. You can find an array of non-alcoholic spirits that can replace their alcoholic equivalents. So go ahead, make your next rum cake alcohol-free, and don’t worry about the alcohol content in your future bakes.

For more, check out the original article on Daily Meal.