Baba Cakes
To one and one-half cups Brioche dough add one-third cup each raisins seeded and cut in pieces, currants, and citron thinly sliced, previously soaked in Maraschino for one hour. Shape, let rise, and bake same as Rum Cakes. Dip in sauce made same as Rum Sauce, substituting Maraschino in place of rum.
This is a variation entry, not a standalone recipe: it assumes you already have the book's Brioche, Rum Cakes and Rum Sauce pages open. Read all four before starting.
- The hinge: the dough must be coldWork with cold dough -- brioche dough handles best straight from the refrigerator, and studding it with sticky liqueur-soaked fruit is easier when it is cold. Warm dough tends to smear rather than take up the fruit, and the butter can begin to separate.
- Drain the fruitThe raisins, currants and citron come out of the maraschino wet. Drain them well and pat dry before working them in, or the extra liquid will slacken the dough. The drained liqueur is worth saving for the syrup.
- Maraschino means the liqueurThe clear cherry-kernel liqueur of the Dalmatian coast, not the pink syrup from a jar of cocktail cherries. Modern maraschino liqueur (Luxardo and similar) is the correct substitute; the bottled cherry syrup is not, and will make the cakes cloying.
- CitronCandied citron peel, sold in blocks or diced tubs around the winter holidays. Slice it thin as directed rather than using pre-chopped mixed peel, which is mostly orange and lemon.
- MouldsThe recipe defers to the book's Rum Cakes page for shaping. Small deep tins are the usual choice: dariole moulds, individual timbale cups, or a muffin tin as a compromise. Butter them well and fill no more than halfway; brioche dough enriched with fruit rises vigorously.
- OvenThe recipe gives no temperature, sending you to the Rum Cakes page instead. About 375F for 15 to 20 minutes suits small cakes of this kind. They want a good deep brown, since a pale baba turns soggy the moment it meets syrup.
- The soaking syrupRum sauces of this kind are generally a sugar-and-water syrup flavoured with spirit; check the book's Rum Sauce page for its proportions and substitute maraschino for the rum. Add the liqueur off the heat so the flavour survives, and dip the cakes while they are still warm and the syrup is hot -- that is when they drink most.
- YieldA cup and a half of brioche dough plus a cup of fruit makes roughly eight to ten small cakes. They are best the day they are made, though the syrup keeps them edible a day longer.
The baba is a yeast cake soaked in sweetened spirit, and its name is generally traced to the Polish babka, carried into French pastry in the eighteenth century; the popular story credits the exiled Polish king Stanisław Leszczyński with dunking a dry kugelhopf in sweetened wine, though that is a tradition rather than a documented event. By the time this book was compiled, baba au rhum was standard in French professional pastry. The maraschino substitution reflects the same taste: the liqueur, distilled from marasca cherries and their crushed stones around Zadar on the Adriatic, was valued for being dry and faintly bitter rather than sweet.