Cake #11: Rum-drenched Vanilla Cake!

On January 29th, I made the next cake in the book, to take to a homebrew club meeting. You bake it in 2 bread pans, mine were glass. After following the directions, I went back and changed the order, so that if I make this cake again, it will be done in the proper order.
Like, #1 should be- take the eggs out of the fridge and let them sit 30 min at room temp.
#2- melt butter (almost 2 sticks!)
#3 mix dry ingredients.
#4 Make syrup (which is #11 in the book, but I figured you could do this while waiting for the eggs to warm up). The syrup is sugar and water heated up, and rum added. I used Cruzan aged rum.
#5 preheat the oven (I noticed that a lot of recipes have you do this first thing, even if it's going to take 45 minutes to prepare the food. Then the oven sits there preheated for 30 minutes while you start sweating in a hot kitchen!)
Oh, also #5, butter the pans. The book says to line the bottoms with parchment paper and spray the sides and bottom of the pans. I'm not even sure what parchment paper is, but I know why- so that you can easily flip the cake out of the pan, then flip it back upright to frost (or syrup, in this case).
I decided to cheat and just use a lot of butter in the pans so that the cake wouldn't stick. (I'm also anti-spray) You'll see how that turned out in a moment.
#6-#7 Mix sugar & eggs, then add vanilla, cream & rum. After that, I pretty much followed the order the book said- you fold the dry ingredients in with the wet, which makes it look pretty lumpy. Then you fold in half of the melted butter, then the other half, which makes it pretty smooth, like frosting.
The recipe said to put the pans on a cookie sheet in the oven, which I did, but they didn't spill over at all, so I don't know if that was necessary. After 30 minutes, I covered them with (recycled, reused) tin foil to keep the tops from browning too much. It was supposed to take another 25-30 minutes after covering, but it took about 40 before the toothpick came out clean.
The recipe says when the cakes are done, cool them for 5 minutes, then flip them out of the pan. I think glass stays hotter than other types of pans, so next time I would wait 10 minutes.
As you can see, one of them stuck to the bottom of the pan and broke apart, so maybe that parchment thing would have worked better. The other cake came out in one piece, with some encouraging and careful pan shaking!
I put the cakes on racks with wax paper underneath, then poked holes all over the top using a bamboo skewer, then brushed the rum syrup all over the tops. It seemed like a hell of a lot of syrup, but then the title of the cake is "rum-drenched"! In the end, the rum didn't soak too far into the cake, not even half way. Next time I would poke those holes much deeper! You couldn't really taste the rum too much either, and the cake tasted a bit plain for my taste, like yellow cake. It could have been better.