No. 3288

Babas with Rum—Small

Petits Babas au Rhum

Cut two ounces of candied fruits into small dice, such as citron, orange peel, preserved pears and a few cherries; add to them as many currants and raisins well washed in hot water, picked and cleaned. Prepare a small baba paste as described in No. 129, and when ready to mold stir in the fruits. Butter some small baba molds, fill them half full with the paste, and leave to rise; when entirely full push into a hot oven to bake; unmold as soon as done, and dip them into a hot thirty-two degree syrup well flavored with vanilla and rum (No. 102).

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For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer assumes you have his baba paste (No. 129) and his flavored syrup (No. 102) already in hand, so the instructions here are really about fruit, proving and soaking. The hinge is the soak: warm cakes into hot syrup, or they take up nothing.

The pasteA baba paste is a slack, heavily buttered yeast dough — closer to a thick batter than a bread dough, with plenty of egg. It is soft enough to be spooned or piped into molds, and the fruit is stirred in only at the moment of molding rather than kneaded through earlier.
Molds"Small baba molds" are close to dariole molds: straight-sided or slightly flared tinned cups, commonly of about 2 to 3 fluid ounces. Buttered timbale molds, popover tins or dariole-shaped silicone cups all work. The recipe gives no yield; the quantity of paste comes from No. 129.
Half full, then fullThe dough is proved in the mold until it reaches the rim — perhaps 30 to 45 minutes in a warm room, depending on the dough and the room — and goes into the oven at that point, not after. A baba left to over-prove is liable to collapse in the heat.
"A hot oven"For cakes this size, 400 to 425F, 15 to 20 minutes, until deep brown and firm at the sides. They are meant to bake fast so the crumb sets while still open and spongy.
Thirty-two degree syrupDegrees Baume, read on a syrup hydrometer, not degrees of temperature. Thirty-two Baume is a heavy syrup of roughly 60 percent sugar — in practice about 3 parts sugar to 2 parts water by weight, boiled to dissolve. Flavor it with a split vanilla bean and add the rum off the heat so it is not driven off.
The soakUnmold while hot and dip while both cake and syrup are hot. A cooled baba dipped in cool syrup wets only its crust. Give them a minute or two submerged, then drain on a rack over a tray and reuse the drippings.
The dried fruitCurrants and raisins washed in hot water and picked over is nineteenth-century practice for fruit that arrived sandy and stemmy. Modern dried fruit needs only a brief plumping in hot water or rum, then thorough draining, or the wet fruit will slacken the paste.
ServingAn entremets course cake, served warm or at room temperature.

A Little History

Babas reached the French repertoire from Poland, and the story most often repeated traces them to the exiled king Stanislas Leszczynski, who is said to have moistened a dry kugelhopf with sweet wine at his court in Lorraine; the tale is traditional rather than documented, and the name's origin is likewise disputed. What is certain is that by the time Charles Ranhofer was running the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York, the rum-soaked yeast cake was standard high-restaurant work, made in quantity in small molds so it could be sent out as an entremets. Ranhofer's book is built as a system of cross-references — the paste at No. 129, the syrup at No. 102 — which tells you it was written for a professional brigade with those preparations already standing in the kitchen, not for a home cook starting from nothing.