Kentucky Butter Cake with Rum Sauce

Kentucky Butter Cake with Rum Sauce - made September 27, 2021 from The Southern Lady Cooks 

2 cups granulated sugar

4 large eggs

1 cup (2 sticks) butter, softened

2 teaspoons rum or vanilla extract

1 cup buttermilk

3 cups all-purpose flour

1 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon baking powder

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1. Preheat oven to 325 degrees F. Generously spay a Bundt pan with nonstick cooking spray and lightly flour.
2. In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, cream together granulated sugar and butter until combined and creamy. Add eggs, one at a time, mixing briefly until just combined, after each addition. Add buttermilk and rum or vanilla extract; mix just until combined.
3. In a separate bowl, whisk together flour, salt, baking powder and baking soda. Add half of the dry ingredients to the butter mixture and mix until just combined. Add remaining dry ingredients and mix until just combined.
4. Pour batter into Bundt pan and smooth top. Bake for 55-60 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the thickest part of the cake comes out with a few moist crumbs. Remove from oven and let cool for several minutes before loosening sides of cake and center with a spatula rubber spatula. Turn over on a cake plate.

Rum Sauce

3/4 cup granulated sugar

1/3 cup butter

3 tablespoons water

2 teaspoons rum or vanilla extract

1. Combine all sauce ingredients in a saucepan and cook over medium heat, whisking until combined and fully melted. Do not boil. Poke holes over cake and pour sauce over cake.

Sometimes I'm hesitant to make southern desserts. Ever since I made "Southern Tea Cakes" and someone from the South disparaged the version I posted and basically suggested I should stop trying since I knew nothing about it, it's made me a little gunshy. I can't remember her exact words (although apparently I did log it in the post where I wrote about it when I clearly still remembered it) but, 5 years later, it's true that you can never forget how someone made you feel. In that case, this person made me feel chastised, defensive and very skeptical about the legend of Southern hospitality and manners.

I got over the feeling, thanks to another Southerner who did embody kindness and grace and shared her grandmother's recipe for the tea cakes. But since then, I've been leery about trying other Southern desserts as I really didn't need someone else to smack me around about it.

But, hey, you have to get over stuff like that or else you give it too much power and meaning. So back I go, wading into the South, with this recipe for Kentucky Butter Cake. This is from The Southern Lady Cooks so I'm going to assume she knows what she's talking about. Coincidentally, I also found two other recipes for Kentucky Butter Cake that was almost the exact same as this one, one from another blog who got it from allrecipes.com and another one from a culinary cozy mystery set in Kentucky. 

I say "almost" the same as the only difference with this one is the addition of rum in the cake and in the glaze. Otherwise, the ingredients and the measurements were the same. Which is unusual as usually a recipe with the same name may have the same ingredients but they're often in different measurements (think of chocolate chip cookie recipes). But nope, the amount of flour, butter, sugar, number of eggs, etc were all the same. So I'm going to assume this is a representative recipe for Kentucky Butter Cake.

Which turned out to be a pretty good butter pound cake. I was slicing these up to be given away so I wasn't going to serve it with copious amounts of butter sauce. One recipe of the butter sauce turned out to be too much for merely glazing the cake so I ended up making two cakes and used the butter sauce to glaze both cakes. That worked out fine. And I channeled that Southern hospitality to pass these out to our local homeless population.