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.
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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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.
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Cover and prove 60 minutes until doubled.
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Pipe or spoon into eight buttered dariole moulds, filling them a third full. Prove 45 minutes until risen to the rim.
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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.
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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.
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Submerge the dry babas in the warm syrup and leave 20 minutes, turning once, until completely saturated and heavy.
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Lift out carefully, drizzle with the extra rum, and serve with cream whipped with the icing sugar.
Related guide: Prep, cook and total time.
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What Can Go Wrong
- Bake them dry. A moist baba cannot absorb syrup.
- Warm syrup, never hot. Hot syrup seals the outside.
- 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.
Your notes on this recipe
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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 .