Come for the recipe, stay for the story!
Cake:
1.5 oz raisins or currants (1/3 cu)
1 Tbls. dark rum 1 orange (for zest)
4 oz whole milk (1/2 cu)
1 pack of active dry yeast (2 1/4 tsp)
2 Tbls sugar
2 large eggs, room temperature
7 1/2 oz all purpose flour (1 & 2/3 cups)
1/2 tsp salt
2 oz butter, soft (4 Tbls which is half a stick)
Syrup:
12 oz water (1 & 1/2 cu)
7.5 oz sugar (1 cu)
2/3 cu dark rum
1/2 tsp vanilla
Topping:
1 pint of heavy whipping cream
sprinkle of confectioner's sugar
chopped pineapple (I used left over pineapple rings from last week's pineapple upside down cake)
2 tbls butter
sprinkle of sugar to cover bottom of pan
sprinkle of black pepper
toasted coconut
1. Soak raisins in 1 Tbls rum, set aside
2. Grease 4" ring molds with butter and then cover with a light layer of sugar, set aside
3. Warm milk to about 115 F should feel like a baby's bathwater, just barely warm to the touch. Add the sugar and the yeast and give a gentle mix. May look speckled like bottom left picture. Let set for 5 minutes.
4. After 5 minutes yeast should be thicker and foamy-ish like in bottom right photo.
5. Once yeast is awake, add your eggs and stir until combined.
6. Add flour, salt, orange zest and butter, mix on low speed until combined, and then mix on medium-high speed for 5 minutes. (allowing for proper gluten development)
7. After mixed, set aside, covered, to rest for one hour. Your dough will be like a really sticky, thick cake batter (Top right photo)
8. After an hour your cake batter will have grown about double in size, and may look a little bubbly (yay yeast!) (bottom left pic compared to top right pic)
9. Drain raisins and gently stir them in. (keep extra rum for syrup!)
10. Spoon or pipe batter into your pans until they are half full. Cover with a damp towel and let rest until the batter is almost to the top. While they are resting, preheat oven to 375 F. (I left mine resting on my stove top while the oven was preheating and it only took about 30 minutes for the second rise, but if you leave them in a cooler place it may take a little longer). 11. Once batter is almost to the brim of the pan, bake for about 30 minutes until golden brown and a toothpick comes out of the cake clean.
12. While cakes are baking, make the syrup: put water and sugar in a pot and cook until sugar is dissolved. (Water will go from cloudy to clear). Remove from heat and add rum and vanilla. (If you want to cook off more of the alcohol you can put it back over the heat for a minute of two.)
13. Once cakes are baked, remove from the oven and let set in pans for 10 minutes. After 10 minutes flip them out onto a sheet tray or into a bowl. Pour all of the cooled syrup over top and let them cool.
14. While the cakes are cooling 2 tbls of butter in a frying pan.
15. Sprinkle just enough sugar to cover the bottom of the pan and add pineapple, sprinkle with a little black pepper.
16. Cook until the pineapple starts to turn a caramely, golden brown color, then remove from heat. 17. Put heavy cream in a bowl with the confectioners sugar, the amount of sugar here is really just personal preference (How sweet do you want your whipped cream? I only used about 2 tsp. because I like mine only lightly sweetened. You can mix it a bit and then taste it and add more if needed.) Mix with a whisk (Pastry muscle!) or use a hand mixer until it has thickened up. Dont overwhip it or it will turn into butter!
18. Once your cake is cool spoon the whipped cream over top, add the pineapple, and a sprinkle of toasted coconut. (put coconut flakes in the oven on a sheet tray at 350 F for about 10 minutes. Check it around 5 minutes and stir if needed).
Note: I added my pineapple to the cake when it was still a little bit warm, it will melt your whipped cream a bit, but the warmth of the fruit against the chill of the cream is heavenly!
Baba, what an interesting dessert. I had never made one so I was excited for the challenge that this cake episode of the Great English Baking Challenge brought me. (name changed, but you know the show I'm talking about, if you don't message me!) (Season 3 Episode 1 on Netflix)
This cake kind of reminded me of a cake we made in pastry school, the Savarin, which apparently our school's Pastry program creator, Roland Mesnier, referred to as a very manly dessert. So maybe some man in your life will enjoy this one!
The story of the Baba is like some other French pastries, very speculated on. I wanted to find out where it came from and it looks like most agree that it likely evolved from the Kugelhopf. (Interestingly enough that dessert is also debated upon, many different name spellings, and many different countries claim it, this is a highly controversial pastry your dealing with!)
So we have this cake from Austria..Germany..or wherever it came from, but how did it get to France and become the Baba au rhum? You guessed it! Also a debate!
One legend says the King of Poland, (there's another country!) brought it to France. When the King of France (the King of Poland's son in law) tried it, he thought it was too dry and dipped it in some rum and thought it was delicious! A more violent variation of that story is that the King disliked the kugelhopf so much he threw it across the room, it hit and broke a rum bottle which then changed the consistency and color of the dough and "made it irresistible."
Another story is that the King of Poland's pastry chef, Nicolas Stohrer opened a pastry shop in Paris after moving there with the King. He was trying to figure out how to sell some stale cake and after dipping it in rum syrup the Baba was born! (necessity is the mother of invention!) (His pastry shop is still open in France if you want to plan a trip there after our quarantine is over)
There are baba molds that can be bought, but to give a little nod to the origins of the kugelhopf I baked mine in these "kugelhopf-esque" ring molds that I already had. Baba molds were taller and more thimble shaped (wider at the top than at the bottom). Another nod to the kugelhopf is that I chose to keep the currants in the recipe. Many baba recipes now-a-days don't have them. I went a little more non-traditional by topping mine with fruit and whipped cream. Traditionally baba was served plain since it had the fruit inside the cake already. Being stuck in the house I am longing for someplace more tropical so I wanted to at least taste the tropics. Plus I had leftover pineapple and coconut, so here we are..tropical rum baba!
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