When to Add Alcohol

• Some recipes call for pouring liquor onto a baked cake. This can be tricky if you’ve never baked with alcohol before. The flavor could be too strong, or you might oversaturate the cake, creating a soggy mess. It is safer to add liquor to the batter or frosting. If you bake the cake with liquor already in it, some of the alcohol cooks out, blending the flavor of the liquor into the cake. If you add alcohol to the frosting, flavor of the alcohol is stronger; but you can taste the frosting as you mix and adjust the amount of alcohol until you receive the desired taste.

Choose a Complementary Ingredient

• The flavors of the liquor and cake should complement each other, but they don’t have to be the same flavor. For example, you don’t have to use banana-flavored alcohol if you are flavoring a banana cake. Rum, also a tropical product, complements banana and would likely have a pleasing taste. Consider common flavor pairings that enhance each other, like coffee and chocolate. Coffee liqueur intensifies the chocolate flavor in chocolate cake. If you need suggestions, look to other desserts that include alcohol. You may find an unexpected, sophisticated pairings. For example, some bakers add high-end orange-flavored cognacs to cheesecakes. A cake with cream cheese frosting may benefit from the same type of liquor.

Consider Who Will Eat the Cake

• While alcohol cooks out of the cake when added to the batter, only some of the liquor’s alcohol content will come out. The cake will not be alcohol-free and may, therefore, not be an appropriate dessert for everyone. After 30 minutes of baking, about 35 percent of the liquor’s original alcohol content will still be in the cake, according to the United States Department of Agriculture. If you’re serving children or other people who should not consume alcohol, you may want to serve a spiked sauce that each diner can spoon on to her cake slice.

Baking Extracts

• Baking extracts like vanilla extract replicate the flavors of some types of liquor. If you are concerned about a cake's alcohol content, an extract, such as rum extract, may be the best option. When you use liquor or liquor-flavored extracts, you can skip other extracts altogether, unless they are integral to the flavor of the cake. For example, you don’t need to add vanilla extract to a yellow sponge cake if you are adding bourbon. Vanilla is a subtle flavoring that mostly enhances the flavor of a cake. Bourbon would just cover up the extract's flavor.

Experiment and Add Alcohol Incrementally

• The best option is to experiment with the cake batter that you intend to spike, adding the least amount of liquor you think will be necessary to your first tester cake. For subtle flavoring, add about 1 tablespoon to a batch of cake batter. If you prepare the batter from scratch, you can substitute the liquor for a baking extract unless the extract is integral to the cake's flavor. Work your way up incrementally until you find the right volume of alcohol to add. Bakers who want an intense liquor flavor add about 1/4 cup of the ingredient. Rather than baking whole cakes over and over again, divide one batch of cake batter into several small samples, divide the volume of liquor accordingly and bake cupcakes with the sample batter. The alcohol’s intensity will be the same regardless of the size or shape in which you bake the batter.