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Babas Au Maraschino
Prepare exactly the same as No. 930, but substituting the same quantity of maraschino for the rum.
This is a one-line variation on the book's baba au rhum (No. 930), so everything hinges on the earlier recipe and on the single substitution named here. A few things about that substitution need saying.
- Read the parent recipe firstNothing here tells you how to make the babas themselves — you need No. 930 for the yeasted dough, the moulds and the soaking syrup. This entry changes one ingredient and nothing else.
- Maraschino means the liqueurMaraschino is a clear, dry-ish cherry liqueur distilled from Marasca cherries, pits included, at roughly 30-32% alcohol. It is not the pink syrup from a jar of cocktail cherries, which is sugar, water and flavouring and will make the babas cloying rather than perfumed.
- Substituting by volume, not by strengthThe recipe says the same quantity, and maraschino is sweeter and lower in alcohol than most rum. If the parent syrup was balanced for rum, taste it before soaking and consider cutting the sugar a little to compensate.
- Soak warm, serve coolBabas take up syrup best when the cakes are barely warm and the syrup is hot; adding the liqueur off the heat, or spooning it over afterwards, keeps the aromatics from being driven off. A day-old baba is often said to absorb better than a fresh one and to hold its shape better.
- MouldsBabas of this period were commonly baked in small dariole or timbale moulds; check No. 930 for the size this book intends. Buttered ramekins or a muffin tin work; fill them no more than halfway and let the dough rise to the rim.
The baba is generally traced to the enriched yeast cakes of Poland and eastern France, and the story that Stanislaw Leszczynski, the exiled Polish king resident at Luneville, soaked a dry kugelhopf in sweetened wine and named it for Ali Baba is repeated everywhere but documented nowhere. By the nineteenth century Parisian patissiers had settled on the form: a small yeasted cake, baked in a dariole mould, drenched in hot syrup and spirit. Rum was the usual choice, and a restaurant kitchen could signal variety by changing the spirit rather than the cake -- hence this entry, which does no more than swap in maraschino, the clear cherry-stone liqueur associated with Zadar on the Dalmatian coast, which was a familiar bottle in American bars and pastry rooms around 1900.