French · Desserts

Baba au Rhum

A yeasted sponge soaked until it is saturated with rum syrup. It should be heavy with it — a dry baba is a failed one.

1 hr 5 min prep and cooking plus 3 hr 5 min both proves and drying the babas 4 hr 10 min start to finish Serves 8 servings Hard
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Baba au Rhum

Photograph credit: BabaRum (image of rum baba on Wikidata Q265457) by Popo le Chien · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons · this resized copy is shared under the same licence

How to Cook Baba au Rhum

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  1. Beat the flour, yeast, sugar, salt, eggs and milk with a dough hook for 8 minutes, until elastic. Beat in the softened butter and continue 5 minutes more.

  2. Cover and prove 60 minutes until doubled.

  3. Pipe or spoon into eight buttered dariole moulds, filling them a third full. Prove 45 minutes until risen to the rim.

  4. Bake at 190°C / 375°F for 25 minutes, until very dark and completely dry. Turn out and leave to cool and dry further for at least an hour.

  5. Boil the syrup water, sugar, vanilla and orange peel for 5 minutes, then take off the heat and cool to warm. Stir in the 200 ml rum.

  6. Submerge the dry babas in the warm syrup and leave 20 minutes, turning once, until completely saturated and heavy.

  7. Lift out carefully, drizzle with the extra rum, and serve with cream whipped with the icing sugar.

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What Can Go Wrong

  1. Bake them dry. A moist baba cannot absorb syrup.
  2. Warm syrup, never hot. Hot syrup seals the outside.
  3. They should feel heavy when you lift them out.

The Short Version

The baba is baked until genuinely dry — it looks overbaked and is exactly right — because a moist sponge cannot absorb syrup and simply falls apart in it. Some bakers leave them out overnight to stale further. The syrup goes on warm, not hot: boiling syrup cooks the outside of the sponge and seals it, so the middle stays dry however long you leave it in.

What to Serve It With

Whipped cream · More rum · Espresso

Keeping Baba au Rhum

Soaked, 2 days refrigerated. Unsoaked babas keep a week and freeze for 2 months.

Questions People Ask

How long does Baba au Rhum take to make?

35 minutes of preparation and 30 minutes of cooking, plus 3 hours 5 minutes of both proves and drying the babas, so allow 4 hours 10 minutes from start to finish. The recipe serves 8.

Baba au Rhum Nutrition Facts

No nutrition figures are given for this recipe: they cannot be worked out reliably from its ingredient list (some ingredient lines cannot be read). Why some recipes have none.

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Compiled by Turab

Checked by script for timings, diet labels and nutrition arithmetic. How the recipes are checked. Found a mistake? Tell us.

First published ; last changed .