Orange Cake with Hot Rum Sauce

This orange cake with hot rum sauce is a buttermilk-based tube cake in the great Southern tradition of pour-over rum cakes. The batter is rich with creamed butter, five teaspoons of orange zest, and a full cup of chopped pecans, and the buttermilk does its job both as a tenderizer and a tang against the citrus.

The rum sauce is the move that elevates this from a good Sunday cake to a great one. Boiled briefly to dissolve the sugar, then mixed with orange juice, lemon juice, and rum, it gets spooned over the cake while still warm in the pan. The cake drinks the syrup in slowly, deepening the flavor and locking in moisture so the cake stays tender for days.

A dusting of powdered sugar finishes it for serving. The look is plain and the flavor isn’t.

Pro Tips

• Add the eggs one at a time, beating well after each. Aggressive at-once additions break the emulsion and give a heavy, dense crumb.
• Alternate buttermilk and dry ingredients in three additions, beginning and ending with the dry. This is the classic technique for tender, even cakes; rushing it makes a tough cake.
• Spoon the rum sauce over slowly. Pour it on too fast and it pools at the bottom rather than soaking through evenly.
• Store loosely covered, not airtight. The cake needs to breathe slightly so the sauce doesn’t make it gummy.

Variations

• Swap pecans for walnuts for a slightly sharper, more bitter contrast against the sweet syrup.
• Use bourbon or dark rum instead of light rum for a deeper, more caramel-toned sauce.
• Add a teaspoon of vanilla bean paste to the batter for an extra round, vanilla-forward note.