🧁 Rum baba
Babà al rum is a small, mushroom-shaped yeast cake made from a rich dough of flour, eggs, butter and sugar. After baking it is soaked in warm rum syrup until it is completely saturated, so every bite is soft, spongy and boozy. In Naples it is sold in every pastry shop, eaten on its own or split and filled, and often glazed with apricot jam for shine.
Diets
Allergens
Contains (in a typical recipe):
What it is made of
Recipe
Ingredients
- 250 g strong flour
- 4 eggs
- 80 g butter, soft
- 20 g sugar, a pinch of salt
- 10 g fresh yeast dissolved in 2 tbsp warm water
- For the syrup: 500 ml water, 250 g sugar, 1 strip lemon peel, 100 ml dark rum
Method
- Mix the flour, sugar, yeast and eggs one at a time into an elastic, sticky dough, kneading 10 minutes. Add the salt, then the butter a little at a time until absorbed.
- Fill buttered baba moulds a third full and leave to rise until the dough reaches the rim, about 1 hour.
- Bake at 180 °C for 20–25 minutes until deep golden. Cool and let them dry for a few hours.
- Boil the water, sugar and lemon peel for 5 minutes, take off the heat and add the rum.
- Dip each baba in the warm syrup, pressing gently until fully soaked, then drain on a rack and serve.
How to make it lighter
- Most of the calories come from the syrup: soak the cakes, then let them drain well instead of serving them in a pool of syrup.
- Bake mini babas of about 30 g — the same treat in a third of the size.
- Skip extra whipped toppings and serve with fresh berries.
History
The story usually told is that the baba began in the 18th century at the court of the exiled Polish king Stanisław Leszczyński in Lorraine, where a dry kugelhopf-style cake was soaked in sweet wine. The idea is said to have passed to Paris pastry cooks, who switched to rum syrup. French-trained chefs working for Neapolitan noble families are then said to have brought it to Naples, where it became one of the city’s signature sweets.
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Values are estimates per 100 g for a typical recipe; home and restaurant versions vary. Diets and allergens are worked out from the ingredients of a typical recipe — always check with whoever cooked the dish. Not medical advice. Nutrition data: Me Nutrition dish database v13. How we count →