Give Poke Cake A Boozy Twist And Pour On The Bourbon

If you've ever delighted in a mint julep or a whiskey sour, you know how well bourbon pairs with sweets. By the same token, if you like Hot Toddies and Kentucky Mules, you also know bourbon pairs well with baking spices. These complementary cocktail ingredients and a wealth of dessert tasting notes make bourbon the perfect booze to pour over a poke cake.

As its name implies, poke cakes are infused with soaking liquid poured over evenly spaced poked holes. The soaking liquid brings flavor and moisture to an otherwise plain sheet cake, encompassing a wide range of syrups, sauces, puddings, and dairy milk products. Bourbon is one extra ingredient to tack onto a soaking liquid recipe with little effort or technique. It will impart complex notes that'll complement dessert ingredients like caramel, maple, fruit, and baking spices while also leaving a rich, boozy finish.

Since most poke cake soaking liquids aren't reduced or otherwise heated, you'll be adding bourbon straight from the bottle. Consequently, your poke cake will have alcohol content and the intense bite that comes with it. So, the amount of bourbon you choose to add to soaking liquid depends on how intense you want the bourbon flavor to be. You can start small, with a few tablespoons, but some recipes use as much as a quarter of a cup. That said, reducing the soaking liquid will burn off the alcoholic taste and enhance the whiskey's underlying tasting notes.

There's no shortage of poke cake recipes that will benefit from a boozy bourbon upgrade. You can start by analyzing bourbon's many common tasting notes, many of which overlap with cake flavors. For instance, bourbon often contains aromatic notes like vanilla and caramel. A vanilla cake would be a great foundation for a bourbon-spiked soaking liquid. You could add bourbon to a salted caramel sauce and cream soaking liquid. It would also pair perfectly with the caramelized taste of sweetened condensed milk in a tres leches cake, perhaps the most beloved form of poke cake.

Fruity notes in bourbon include apples, berries, stone fruit, and pineapple, so it'll work well with an apple cider reduction featuring cinnamon and cloves. Reduce bourbon with brown sugar and maple syrup to blend with muddled peaches for a bourbon-peach poke cake. For a fall-inspired poke cake, add bourbon to a caramel sauce to pour over a pumpkin spice cake. As nuts are another common bourbon tasting note, it'll pair well with the nuttiness of coconut in this pineapple-coconut poke cake.

Another avenue is to model bourbon poke cakes after iconic cocktails. For example, you could blend whiskey with mint extract and sweetened condensed milk to pour over chocolate cake for a twist on mint juleps. Blend orange zest, juice, and bourbon into vanilla pudding to pour over white cake with maraschino cherry garnishes for an Old Fashioned-inspired poke cake.