Hey guys! Guess what I’ve got for you: a cola coke!

Oh, cool, so you make it with a cola, like Coke or Pepsi?

Nope, there’s no cola in it at all!

Well, I guess the stress of recipe testing finally got to ol’ Mike. He’s not making sense anymore! Optional Kitchen: more like optional logic.

Whoa, whoa: hold up there, imaginary reader. I know it sounds weird, and maybe like false advertising — a cola cake with no cola! — but if I hadn’t told you, you’d never know to taste it. I swear. Biting into this cake brings in all the bite and sweetness of a commercial cola, even though you won’t see Coca-Cola (or Pepsi, or RC, or whatever) in the ingredient list.

But let’s jump back a moment: why am I making a cola cake to begin with, and why not just use a bottled soda to do it? For the first, I’ll just say that there’s a long tradition of cooking with Coca-Cola, especially in the south. Although Coca-Cola is a huge multinational corporation now, it had its start in western Georgia, where it’s still headquartered today. So the drink is ubiquitous, and it’s an easy source of rich flavor and leavening. Most coke cakes, though, are chocolate coke cakes. And though I acknowledge that they’re tasty, a while back I got a bug in my ear to make a cake that carries the sweet, sharp bite of a cola, unmasked by anything else.

As for the other matter, the lack of bottled soda? Simple: I mostly gave up drinking soda years back, so I don’t usually have it around. I’ll occasionally have a fountain drink at a restaurant, but at home it’s usually tea or water, or seltzer water if I want some fizz. (Ask me sometime about my small collection of fizzy water makers, not to mention my obsessive desire for LaCroix coconut and grapefruit.) So if I want to make a cola cake, I have to go out of my way to buy some Coke…

… or I can just fake it.  And if you go out looking for homemade cola syrup on the internet, you’ll discover that a lot of people do exactly that, for dietary, monetary, and other reasons. You can find a whole range of recipes, from the very simple to the apothecarily complex (think bitter orange peel and gum arabic) and all points between. But what they all have in common is lime, cinnamon, and something molasses-y, whether that’s molasses proper or cane syrup or brown sugar.

Which is exactly what you’ve got going on here. A prodigious amount of lime zest (plus the juice from those limes), a heavy dose of cinnamon, and a nice thick pour of molasses, — plus an equally heavy dose of coriander, which brings out both the spicy and the citrusy notes of the other ingredients. A quick stint in the oven yields a cake with a tender crumb and bold citrus flavors paired with sharp woody notes from the spices, all backed up by a low rumble of dark molasses. Which is a fancy way of saying that the cake tastes like a swig of ice-cold cola… if cola were a cake. Whether you’re an expat Southerner like me, a soda fiend like I used to be, or you just think the idea of a new kind of spice cake sounds fun, give it a whirl.