The Nostalgic Ice Cream On The Cake: I’m Rum Raisin’ The Roof

…or rum raisin’ the bar because man, these are so so good (really Amber – don’t sugar coat it, tell us how you really feel you modest modest baker you 😉 ).

Here’s the thing though, in the interest of each “ice cream” flavoured cake post being slightly different, I wanted to do a different form of cake for each week (to recap: week 1 was a layer cake, week 2 was cupcakes and last week were the ice cream cone cupcakes). So, for this week, as much as it pained me to do it, I opted to go the cake pop route (*shudder*)…at first anyway. Once I discovered that my cake pop prejudice has always been completely justified (both on the hipster snobbery front as well as the actual baking of them front), I opted to make half of these into the even more kowtowing-to-popular-culture format of the cake ball. I love cake balls (that’s what she said 😉 ). I’ve discovered that not only are they delicious and bite-sized balls of goodness that are reminiscent of the Candiana that is the timbit, they’re also a) incredibly easy to make and b) they actually demand that you “screw up” your cake making. You know what that means don’t you? If you ever make a cake or cupcakes in the future and they completely fall apart as you remove them from their baking vessel (you know, because you couldn’t stop yourself…err…your young child – yeah, young child that’s what happened here – from sticking their fingers into the still warm and delicious cake to taste test it, you can now just tell everyone that you did it on purpose since you’d been intending to make cake balls all along! Right? Right 😉 . How can I not get behind something that saves your vegan bacon like that? 😉 ).

My first concern with these was that they wouldn’t end up tasting rummy enough for me (or gin-rummy enough if you’re planning on taking these to a fun card shark party). Have you ever noticed how often that’s the case? Yeah, it’s rum raisin ice cream, or rum balls, or rum [fill in food item of choice], and then you take a bite and you think to yourself “I mean, it’s good and all that, but you have no business calling this rum anything since I would never have guessed that it’s supposed to contain that delicious holiday-making ingredient if you hadn’t told me up front. I don’t care if you say children might be eating these so you didn’t want to go to crazy. That’s no excuse. In fact, that’s almost a worse excuse. Because you know what happens then? The adults eating your baked goodery are all like “Delicious, but the real question is will it get me drunk? No? Hmmm…definitely not rummy enough 😉 ”. Then the kids are all like “These are mostly good, but there’s this weird terrible background taste that I don’t like, so I’ll just go ahead and eat my overly-saturated-with-red-food-dye sugar pops instead.” So, congratulations, you’ve disappointed both audiences now. For shame. For shame I say.

I’m incredibly happy to inform you however, that these most definitely did not disappoint on the rum front. And worry not, that’s not to say that they taste like you’re drinking a straight up shot of rum or anything, but it’s definitely noticeable (as it should be! Fifty percent of your dessert’s name is the word “rum”, it should be noticeable! Ok, calm down Amber. Sorry, sorry, rant over now, I promise. Between stupid cake pops and lack of rum flavour, I’ve clearly just lost my head a little. I apologize). I’ll calm myself down now with a relaxing shot of rum….or a few shots of rum cake balls…mmmmm…..