Home › Entrées › Baba Cakes with Apricots
Baba Cakes with Apricots
1½ cups flour 1 yeast cake dissolved in 1/2 cup lukewarm water 2/3 cup butter 4 eggs 1/2 cup sugar ¼ teaspoon salt Make sponge of one-half cup flour and dissolved yeast cake; cover and let rise. Mix remaining flour with butter, two eggs, sugar, and salt. Beat thoroughly, and add, while beating, remaining eggs, one at a time, then beat until mixture is perfectly smooth. As soon as sponge has doubled its bulk, combine mixtures, beat thoroughly, and half fill buttered individual tins. Let rise, and bake in a moderate oven. Remove from tins, cut a circular piece from top of each, and scoop out a small quantity of the inside. Fill centres thus made with Apricot Marmalade, replace circular pieces, and serve with Wine Sauce (see p. 409).
A rich yeast-raised batter in the babà family, baked in small tins and hollowed out to hold marmalade. It is closer to brioche than to cake, and it behaves like brioche: soft, slack, and slow to rise.
- The hinge: beat until it is glossyThe butter, eggs and flour must be beaten until the dough is smooth and elastic before the sponge goes in, or the babàs bake dense and greasy. A stand mixer with the paddle handles this in 8-10 minutes; by hand it is a long job.
- Yeast cakeOne yeast cake of the period is roughly 0.6 oz of compressed fresh yeast, equal to about 2 1/4 teaspoons of active dry or instant yeast. Dissolve in water at 100-110F.
- Salt quantityThe salt reads as 1/4 teaspoon in comparable versions of this batter; treat any larger figure as an error, since a full teaspoon or more would slow the rise noticeably in so small a quantity of flour.
- Moderate ovenRead as roughly 350F (moderate is usually taken as 350-375F). Small tins take about 20-25 minutes; the babas should be deep gold and sound hollow. If the tops brown before the centres set, drop to 325F.
- TinsIndividual dariole moulds or a muffin tin work. Butter generously and fill only halfway, as the original says; the dough roughly doubles in the tin.
- Rising timesNone are given; the recipe works from visual cues instead ("as soon as sponge has doubled its bulk"). Expect roughly 1 to 1 1/2 hours for the sponge to double and 45-60 minutes for the filled tins in a modern room; the batter is buttery and will not rush.
- Yield and servingMakes about 10-12 small cakes. Hollow them while barely warm, fill, and serve the same day with the wine sauce poured over at the table.
- Apricot marmaladeNot orange marmalade -- the book means apricot preserve cooked down thick. A good thick apricot jam, warmed and sieved of large pieces, stands in directly.
Baba is generally traced to the yeast-raised cakes of central and eastern Europe, carried into French pastry in the eighteenth century and from there into the Neapolitan baba al rum; the name is usually explained as the Polish and Slavic word for an old woman, applied to the tall fluted shape, though that explanation is traditional rather than settled. What is set down here is a brioche-type dough enriched with butter and four eggs, baked small, hollowed, filled with fruit and sauced with wine rather than soaked in spirits -- the kind of French-derived pastry that turn-of-the-century American cookbooks adapted for a household audience.