Normally, I despise raisins. They’re not quite sweet enough to be pleasant, not quite soft enough to be tender, and yet not hard enough to be crunchy. They’re a filler ingredient that I typically resolutely cannot get behind, with the case of a single exception, and that is when they’re drowned in rum. Something about the warm rich flavors of a spiced rum combined with the tannic fruitiness of the otherwise lowly raisin creates the pinnacle of comfort in flavor-form. But I do have some constraints about the rum-raisin combination. Constraint #1—the raisins must be cooked in the rum so that they absorb it and become soft and juicy little rum-bombs. And constraint #2—a bit of brown sugar and spices need to be added to sweeten it up a bit and add a caramel note to the mixture. This boozy marriage of rum and raisin makes up the filling for this pumpkin bundt cake, and the flavor as a whole is pretty much autumn concentrated into cake-form.

And if you couldn’t already tell from the above—I’m firmly on the side of booze in sweets. There’s just some magical extra depth of flavor that they impart to baked goods (especially warm-flavored ones like rum or bourbon) that nothing else can quite match. And if you’re thinking “ummmm it’s probably the alcohol”—that isn’t really the case once something is baked. Because alcohol evaporates at such a much lower temperature than water, the vast majority of the actual alcohol itself evaporates out of the cake while it’s in the piping hot oven. And this wonderful chemical reaction leaves you with all the wonderful flavor of liquors like rum, but without the burn. Knowing this, I put a generous amount of rum both in the pumpkin bundt cake batter and in the rum raisin filling. So overall it’s a pretty darn good bundt cake.

As far as getting the cake out of the actual pan—I live by these tips from King Arthur Flour. They, along with my go-to cooking spray I use exclusively with my bundt pans, keeps my cakes coming out unharmed every time. I also have an oldie-but-goodie Pumpkin Maple Bourbon Bread Pudding recipe here from ye ol’ archives, if you’re fully on the pumpkin train. I wish you the best of luck with your bundt cake endeavors, my friend, and wish you a lovely start to your November!