This cake topped off a great meal with friends on New Year’s Day. We did things a little different and had just a couple of drinks on New Year’s Eve, then guzzled wine like there was no tomorrow on the first. We don’t exactly believe in resolutions to start the year off treating our bodies like a temple.

Assana provided wine, appetizers and a lovely salad. I prepped the ingredients for chicken pot pies, which we assembled the day before. We got creative with our decorations on top of the pot pies. I can’t post photos because they’re not family-friendly, but we crack ourselves up.

Before I talk about the cake – because it’s all about the cake – I need to express how much I love these pot pies. I’ve been making them for almost 20 years (aak), and I never tire of them. They can be made ahead and frozen, and then popped right into the oven from the freezer (they need to cook a bit longer and you need to keep an eye on how much the top browns). If you don’t want to make the rough puff pastry, don’t. Use a store-bought puff pastry, preferably all-butter such as Dufour.

I wasn’t quite sure if I should serve this cake at a dinner party, but this is a pretty informal group. The cake is deceptively plain looking. It’s brown and rectangular and doesn’t even come out of the pan before serving. It gets a shower of warm sugar-rum syrup after it comes out of the oven, and then, a bit of time under the broiler so the sugars gets brown and bubbly. It’s the first time I’ve made a cake like this.

There’s rum in the cake, rum in the syrup, and rum in the whipped cream. Lots of other bakers said it was really rummy. I didn’t think so – it’s rummy, but in a delicious way. I used our favorite rum, Zacapa 23. It’s more like a boozy pound cake than anything, but maybe less rich. I know I’m going to make it again, that’s for sure.

For the recipe and to see how the other Baked Sunday Mornings bakers fared, head over to Baked Sunday Mornings.

• Chicken Pot Pie (Fine Cooking #13)
• Hair of the Dog Cake (Baked Occasions, p. 28)