Keto Spiced Rum Pound Cake

This keto rum cake is rich and tender, with the sweet intensity of dark rum and spices. Delicious on its own or with a dollop of sugar-free whipped cream, it’s the perfect holiday dessert.

It wouldn’t be the holidays without some sort of rum-soaked treat, right? Somehow, rum has become closely associated with holiday sweet treats.

Keto rum balls come to mind. As does adding a shot of dark rum to your keto eggnog. And it’s pretty standard in sugar-free mincemeat too.

Now I am adding keto rum cake to the rum-laden collection. This sweetly spiced keto cake is heavenly. It’s easy to make, so rich and moist, and it’s the perfect addition to your holiday dessert table.

Is rum keto?

There is a lot of confusion surrounding hard alcohol and whether it’s keto friendly. So let’s clear it up once and for all, shall we?

Pure spirits have no sugars and zero grams of carbohydrate. That’s right, none. Zip, zilch, nada. That includes rum, tequila, vodka, gin, brandy, and cognac, and all forms of whiskey.

I think that much of the confusion stems from the fact that many spirits are distilled from sugar, grains, and other starches like potatoes. But all of that sugar is consumed by yeast during the fermentation process so none remains after distillation.

So technically, all of these pure spirits are keto-friendly, right?

But not all rums are truly pure spirits. Some lower quality rum brands add sugar back into the final product, to bring out the sweetness. And flavoured or spiced rums almost always contain a little added sugar.

It’s probably not enough to raise the carb count of a recipe like keto rum cake. But just be aware that not all rum is completely sugar-free. For this cake, I used plain dark rum and simply added some spices.

Ingredients

• Almond flour
• Coconut flour
• Whey protein powder (you can sub egg white protein powder)
• Baking powder
• Spices
• Salt
• Butter
• Sweetener (brown sugar substitute preferred)
• Eggs
• Vanilla extract
• Dark rum
• Toasted pecans

How to make keto rum cake

This is a classic loaf cake recipe and it’s quite easy to make. Here are my best tips for getting it right:

1. Line the pan with parchment. You still want to grease the pan but lining it with parchment that has overhanging edges makes it much easier to remove. I cut my parchment so that it goes across the bottom and up the long sides of the pan, leaving the shorter sides uncovered.
2. Use a metal pan. Metal and glass conduct heat VERY differently and cakes baked in glass take much longer to bake through properly.
3. Whisk the dry ingredients. Be sure to break up any clumps in the almond flour and coconut flour so that it mixes in well when added to the cake.
4. Beat the butter with the sweetener. Really take the time to cream the butter and sweetener together properly, which takes about 2 minutes.
5. Use room temperature eggs. I say this all the time because it’s important! Cold eggs make the nicely creamed butter clump up again and you get little holes in the cake where clumps of butter have melted away.
6. Bake until golden and just firm. Baking times are only guidelines so make sure you check on your baked goods a few minutes before the low end of the range, and keep checking frequently after that.
7. Make the glaze. I recommend using both Swerve and BochaSweet in the glaze, to keep it from re-crystallizing. But if all you have is powdered Swerve or another erythritol sweetener, it will still be great.

Frequently Asked Questions