Last week I made a wonderful butter rum cake with a rum glaze from a recipe that I found on this forum. The client loved it so much that they want another one this weekend but made with no actual rum as it's for a family birthday party with children.  I was just going to make a vanilla cake (scratch) and use rum extract instead of vanilla extract. Sadly the only rum extract that I could find in my small town was artificial :(   Do you think making it this way will taste ok?? Also, is it possible to make a glaze with for the top that doesn't have real rum.  Could I do butter, sugar, water and rum extract? I was thinking maybe adding sweetened condensed milk to the glaze instead of the real rum?  If anyone has any other ideas or input, I would be very grateful :)

i love rum cake!!!!

i would advise them that i could boil out the alcohol to what extent it could be boiled out (most but not all) but it's just not gonna be the same cake at all

also that vanilla extract has a fair amount of alcohol

i would have advised the client to pick another flavor

if what i make is not what they want to serve to their guests then i do not do recipe testing for an average order

it's costs by the hour plus ingredients

or they could go with the same rum cake and cupcakes for the kids

but in my mind i would figure they would be disappointed because they already had one they liked

changing it up would result in a lesser cake imo

are there other ways? sure

there are countless rum extracts and other flavor products out there and maybe they are great maybe even better but it's a gamble and a costly one if it doesn't hit the first time--costs in more materials and time to test and costly if they don't like it and loose interest in your services

think of it this way--

one of the fords who made cars was inspecting a new model

when he climbed out of the back seat he said--add some legroom back here--make the car longer

everything was already heading for the production line

I can't even imagine all the re-work they had to do

they had to basically scrap it and start over frame wise and handling/steering and seat sizes and etc

not like adding some water to the soup

so that's what i think of when peeps want to change my formulas

i know they work and i'm ok right there

some bakers accomodate the requests and i will too if they pay for the time and materials for me to be their private pastry chef