Every celebration in my childhood was blessed with a spice cake that my grandma made. It was my favorite. It didn't matter if there was birthday cake or pumpkin pies there was always spice cake too. I always had a piece of everything. "Yes, I'll have a piece of spice cake with my pumpkin pie and pecan pie. Yes, put whip cream on top the pies." It's a wonder I don't weigh 300 pounds.
Just the smell of spice cake brings me right back to climbing the trees in my grandparents backyard and sitting at the redwood picnic table with the red checked table cloth. Good times.
When my daughter-in-law stated she wanted a dark rum spiked spice cake for their Renaissance themed wedding I thought of my grandma's spice cake recipe. I hadn't made it in a long time. One of the main ingredients is lard. It's not for the diet conscious. The only thing was it didn't have rum in it. So I looked up spice cakes online and discovered some fascinating facts about spice cake. Most spice cakes do indeed have rum in them. I'm sure that my grandmother omitted the rum when she put her recipe together, Grandma and Grandpa didn't drink. I don't know where she got her original recipe, but family members don't remember a time when she didn't make it.
Another interesting fact is that rum spice cakes are very popular in the West Indies and Caribbean Islands dating back to the 17th century. The cake is very dense, full of dried fruits and keeps quite well with all the rum. There have been rumors that my great grandfather Gibson was from the West Indies. All hearsay, but he was much older than my great grandmother and looked exotic in the few photos I've seen of him. He looked nothing like a farmer in Oklahoma. Before he met my great grandmother he was a world traveler. So it's possible he could have been from anywhere.
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