Do not make the apricot brandypud!

Don't try this at home.

When last we saw the raisin butterscotch pudding, some lovely people suggested that we try using dried apricots, and also adding brandy to the sauce. Which sounds good enough to make, but I didn't think my method through very well.

My thought process was quite simple: Replace some of the water that you pour over the batter with brandy. As it happens, this bottle of conveniently flavor-matched apricot brandy happened to be in the cabinet. I don't know how long it's been there, but it hasn't been uncapped since the last time I made a honey fruit pie.

Yes, it is empty now. And yes, that is foreshadowing.

Let's start with the things that that went right. Our chopped apricots looked unexpectedly pretty when I dropped them onto the batter. Incidentally, it turns out that a six-ounce package of dried apricots yields about the ⅔ cup of raisins that the original recipe calls for.

After I mixed the apricots in, I couldn't thinking this looks like one of those salad recipes that ends with the direction "Stir in the marshmallows and refrigerate until dissolved."

As we noted when we made this as written, this recipe goes by really fast. This means we wasted very little time getting to the fire hazards. You see, we had about a half-pint of brandy left in the bottle. (For our metric friends, that's a scant quarter-liter.) Partially to eliminate a shelf-sitting bottle and partially as a nod to the fact that "the relatives from Chicago" were reportedly the very schnockered type of Irish, I poured all of the brandy into the sauce. Also, I had just read a few articles about "tipsy cake" and thought the name was too whimsical to pass up.

Here I had my first warning thoughts about what was going on. The recipe calls for hot water, and putting a lot of liquor in the microwave didn't seem wise. I heated the heavily brandied water on the stove instead, where the vapors had plenty of room to dissipate. I may have been a worrywart, but our microwave remains undamaged. Also, I took this opportunity to put the lemon rind in the pot to better draw its flavor. This was one of the last happy moments before I realized what danger I had just stirred my way into.

After getting the brandy-water into the cake pan, things looked almost normal. I closed the oven, set the timer, and was really excited about our boozy adventure for a few very short minutes. Then I had an awful realization: A lot of the alcohol was going to cook out of this, and the flammable vapors in the oven had nowhere to dissipate to. 

I tried to tell myself that I've made a lot of rum cakes without incident, but none of those involve putting a half-pint of liquor in a hot oven. Before long, I had terrible visions of the alcohol vapors making their way to the red-hot baking coil, leading to something like this:

And so, thanking every available god that no one else was in the house, I kept going to the oven and vigorously flapping the door every few minutes to dispel the fumes. The first time I did that, I got ever-so-slightly dizzy from inhaling so much alcohol. (Or maybe I was imagining that in my worried state of mind.) I don't know if this would have been just fine and I was scaring myself for nothing. But I would like to proudly point out that at the end of the recipe, the oven remained unexploded.

Amid all the angst, the brandied sauce filtered down to the bottom of the pan, just as the non-alcoholic version does. But then it erupted into little bubbling geysers as the baking time wore on. It left the cake perforated with tunnels and holes. 

After most of the sauce boiled away, what remained reminded me of of what sits on a pineapple upside-down cake after you flip it out of the pan.

I tried some of this as soon as it cooled off. It was like doing shots with dessert. Seriously, the alcohol nearly burned. The flavors almost fit together, but this was the first time I've wanted a chaser after a cake.

But with that said, it occurred to me that perhaps some whipped cream was just what this needed. These days, I keep a pint of cream on hand because a lot of recipes call for the occasional splash or spoonful. It took nearly no time at all to make this happen:

I hate how good this was. Like, you could serve it at a wedding. I don't know what sort of magic happened, but the whipped cream on top made united everything below it. I never would have expected such ecstasy from a hasty recipe that had threatened to blow up the kitchen. It's delicious. It is exquisite. I would actually pay for it at restaurants.

And so, in conclusion, I don't think anyone should make this. (You'll note that I didn't even put a recipe on top because I care about all of you.) Just because you have a fire extinguisher in your kitchen doesn't mean you should use it.

But the fault here is with how I did this, not with the idea of an apricot-brandy pudding cake. And the flavor combination is just so good. I'm already thinking about how to make it in ways that don't involve nearly blowing up the kitchen. Perhaps make the apricots-and-brandy sauce on the stove and serve it with the cake?