When two tourists e-mail you hours before they’re leaving the Island to get their hands on some more of your rumcakes — it’s fair to say you have a culinary hit on your hands.That was the case for business partners, Amber Center and Omar Lodge, who recently started a new venture known as Amber’s Rum Cakes.Since their official launch in May, they have seen an influx of tourists coming to their stall to sample their cakes at Destination Dockyard and Harbour Nights in Hamilton.Locals have also jumped in on the action, with some swapping out their traditional birthday cake for Amber’s delicious creations.Mr Lodge said: “We are in our second month and have done a wedding and have made rum cakes for a corporate event. We also did our first restaurant order and that was for 200 medium sized rum cakes, which was really great for us.“In addition to that in the last four weeks now we have had consistent orders on the weekend outside of our Harbour Night sales.”Ms Center has been cooking since she was age 14; and went on to study culinary arts at Keiser University in Florida.Since then she settled into a career in business, but while watching the Food Network Channel one day, she was inspired to bake something similar to a rum cake.“I started tweaking the recipe the chef used over the next three years, to something that suits Bermuda, and then decided to create a rum sauce that goes with it,” Ms Center explained. “I found there was extra sauce left over in the pan and added a couple of extra ingredients for the sauce, which goes on top.”That sauce has been affectionately coined the ‘love sauce’ and creates a completely different rum cake experience, according to Mr Lodge.He first sampled Ms Center’s cakes when she brought them in to co-workers during the holiday season. He was immediately sold and decided to order a few to take to a Christmas family dinner.“I was so ‘gung ho’ about these rum cakes, all I wanted was for people to taste them at my family dinner,” Mr Lodge said. “We had a lot of different desserts on the table and all of a sudden everyone tried the cakes and needless to say they all went.“Beyond me being a fan, one thing that showed me we had a hit on our hands is that one of my family members asked if I thought I could get the baker to make another rum cake for her.“So from there all these light bulbs went off and stars aligned and I thought ‘what a great product, why aren’t you selling it’?”Ms Center said it was “scary” when she was first approached to sell them en masse. She wanted to make sure everything was in line before proceeding, but the two partners gradually started creating a name and logo for the brand.They currently offer two flavours, including original and pecan, but hope to rotate in an additional flavour at least once every quarter.One such flavour will be a Bermuda Rum Swizzle cake, just in time for Cup Match; they also want to utilise other traditional flavours, like loquats, in the future.Both partners said they enjoyed seeing people’s reactions when they sampled the cakes.Mr Lodge told The Royal Gazette: “When you see you can put a smile on someone else’s face and see their expression after tasting our rum cakes for the first time, and they are really pleased and amazed, it’s a beautiful feeling like your hard word has paid off.”For Ms Center, the joy also comes in the process of baking. She said: “Minus the dishes, I love to come home and bake”.“With the rum cakes we don’t overproduce them, so what happens is I make a batch of two at a time and mix everything by hand. I own a Kitchen Aid mixer, but like to have that control over the batter and don’t want to over mix it.“It’s like a science and I think we have figured it out.”Although rum cakes are nothing new to Bermuda, Mr Lodge said they tend to be seasonal like at Christmas time.Their goal is “to break that tradition” and get people to start eating the small cakes as a snack or alternative to doughnuts or other sweets.Their target audience will likely be locals — who can order them for birthday parties, holidays or corporate events — but they also hope to cater to tourists during the busy season.One dilemma they have had is trying to figure out how to ship their product overseas and sell it in stores. The cakes have a two week shell life, and the icing also has to stay refrigerated, “so that is a challenge,” he said.For now they plan to stick with their niche market at Harbour Nights and by selling at local events and to restaurants, but they also hope to grow organically.Mr Lodge said this was his “first entrepreneurial exercise”, but admittedly he has also become hands on in the business by washing dishes, putting stickers and labels on the boxes, scooping icing and taking the lead on the administrative side of things.He said he was excited to see how things might take off in the future.“We are doing everything out of pocket at the moment, which is something we pride ourselves on, because we can control how fast we grow.“In a perfect world, if we both didn’t have full time jobs, we could go ahead and push it to the max, we could have lots of variations of the cake. But we want to grow it organically and don’t want to grow too big, too soon. We definitely endeavour to continually grow month over month, and year over year.”He asserts that it will be “plain to see” as more people taste Amber’s Rum Cakes, what makes the brand different. “After that, notoriety will become more wide spread and the proof will be in the pudding, or the cake, no pun intended,” he added.Amber’s Rum Cakes sell for $6 for a box of three minis or a four-inch cake; the ten inch Bundt cake costs $35. For more information on the cakes, visit the Facebook page or follow them on Instagram @ambersrumcakes.