Rum cake made with plums and raisins soaked in rum, as well as brown sugar and a bittersweet caramel called "browning". Rum cake A rum cake is a type of dessert cake which contains rum. In most of the Caribbean, rum cakes are a traditional holiday season dessert, descended from the holiday puddings (such as figgy pudding). Traditionally, dried fruit is soaked in rum for months and then added to dough prepared with sugar which has been caramelized by boiling in water. The result, also known as "black cake", is similar to a fruitcake, with a lighter texture. In Trinidad and Tobago,
Rum fund enterprises such as slavery (see Triangular trade), organized crime, and military insurgencies (e.g., the American Revolution and Australia's Rum Rebellion). The origin of the word "rum" is generally unclear. In an 1824 essay about the word's origin, Samuel Morewood, a British etymologist, suggested it might be from the British slang term for "the best", as in "having a rum time." He wrote: Given the harsh taste of early rum, this is unlikely. Morewood later suggested another possibility: that it was taken from the last syllable of the Latin word for sugar, "saccharum", an explanation commonly held today, although there