Liqueur Cakes
- Ready In:
- 1hr 30mins
- Ingredients:
- 15
- Yields:
-
4 Loaves (8 in. X 3 3/4 in.), about 6-8 servings eac
- Serves:
- 24
ingredients
- 8 eggs
- 2 2⁄3 cups sugar
- 3 1⁄2 cups flour
- 1 teaspoon baking powder
- 1⁄4 teaspoon salt
- 1 cup heavy cream
- 1 vanilla beans or 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 3⁄4 cup butter, melted, cooled to room temperature
-
Syrups
- 3 cups sugar
- 3⁄4 cup light corn syrup
- 1 1⁄4 cups water
- 1 3⁄4 1 3/4 cups Frangelico (rum and brandy while not really liqueurs, also work well in these cakes) or 1 3/4 cups Grand Marnier (rum and brandy while not really liqueurs, also work well in these cakes)
- 1⁄3 cup almonds, toasted (for Amaretto cake)
- 2 tablespoons orange zest, grated (for Grand Marnier Cake)
- 1⁄3 cup hazelnuts, toasted and chopped (for Frangelico cake)
directions
- Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Grease and flour 4 loaf pans.
- Split open vanilla bean and scrape seeds into cream.
- Drop pod into cream and heat until scalding. Let cool.
- Whisk together the eggs, sugar and salt until well blended.
- Sift the flour and baking powder together.
- Whisk the sifted dry ingredients into the egg/sugar mixture just until blended.
- Remove (and discard) the vanilla bean pod from the cream, and whisk cream into the batter.
- Gently mix in the melted butter, pour batter into the prepared loaf pans and bake for 50-60 minutes or until golden brown and a cake tester comes out clean.
- While cake is baking, prepare syrup by combining sugar, water and corn syrup in a heavy saucepan. Stir mixture over medium-high heat until it comes to a simmer.
- Continue to heat (WITHOUT FURTHER STIRRING or your finished product will have sugar crystals!) until mixture comes to a full boil.
- Cover (also important to avoid those nasty sugar crystals) and continue to boil until all sugar is dissolved and liquid is clear, about a minute.
- Remove from heat and let cool for about 5 minutes.
- Stir in liqueur.
- After removing cakes from the oven, allow them to cool in pan for about 5 minutes.
- Run a knife around the edges of the pan and turn cakes out, then immediately return cakes to pans.
- Use a thin wooden skewer to poke numerous holes into the cake, about 1 inch apart. The holes should go all the way from the top to the bottom of the cake. Pour 1/4 syrup mixture over each cake and, if desired, sprinkle with optional toppings.
- Let cool until the cakes have absorbed the syrup.
- Remove from pans.
- Note: If giving these cakes as gifts, you can use disposable aluminum foil loaf pans and give the cake in the pan.
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Reviews
RECIPE SUBMITTED BY
Julesong
Tukwila, 87
<p>It's simply this: I love to cook! :) <br /><br />I've been hanging out on the internet since the early days and have collected loads of recipes. I've tried to keep the best of them (and often the more unusual) and look forward to sharing them with you, here. <br /><br />I am proud to say that I have several family members who are also on RecipeZaar! <br /><br />My husband, here as <a href=http://www.recipezaar.com/member/39857>Steingrim</a>, is an excellent cook. He rarely uses recipes, though, so often after he's made dinner I sit down at the computer and talk him through how he made the dishes so that I can get it down on paper. Some of these recipes are in his account, some of them in mine - he rarely uses his account, though, so we'll probably usually post them to mine in the future. <br /><br />My sister <a href=http://www.recipezaar.com/member/65957>Cathy is here as cxstitcher</a> and <a href=http://www.recipezaar.com/member/62727>my mom is Juliesmom</a> - say hi to them, eh? <br /><br />Our <a href=http://www.recipezaar.com/member/379862>friend Darrell is here as Uncle Dobo</a>, too! I've been typing in his recipes for him and entering them on R'Zaar. We're hoping that his sisters will soon show up with their own accounts, as well. :) <br /><br />I collect cookbooks (to slow myself down I've limited myself to purchasing them at thrift stores, although I occasionally buy an especially good one at full price), and - yes, I admit it - I love FoodTV. My favorite chefs on the Food Network are Alton Brown, Rachel Ray, Mario Batali, and Giada De Laurentiis. I'm not fond over fakey, over-enthusiastic performance chefs... Emeril drives me up the wall. I appreciate honesty. Of non-celebrity chefs, I've gotta say that that the greatest influences on my cooking have been my mother, Julia Child, and my cooking instructor Chef Gabriel Claycamp at Seattle's Culinary Communion. <br /><br />In the last couple of years I've been typing up all the recipes my grandparents and my mother collected over the years, and am posting them here. Some of them are quite nostalgic and are higher in fat and processed ingredients than recipes I normally collect, but it's really neat to see the different kinds of foods they were interested in... to see them either typewritten oh-so-carefully by my grandfather, in my grandmother's spidery handwriting, or - in some cases - written by my mother years ago in fountain pen ink. It's like time travel. <br /><br />Cooking peeve: food/cooking snobbery. <br /><br />Regarding my black and white icon (which may or may not be the one I'm currently using): it the sea-dragon tattoo that is on the inside of my right ankle. It's also my personal logo.</p>