Rum Baba
I often cook pastry with my son. We usually work in a kind of tandem. He loves to play with dough, and I like to eat it all.
To say the truth, it has become kind of tradition. And the initiative in most cases comes from my little son.
We have already cooked Gugelhupf with him, and we make Tiramisu very often, as well as lots of other desserts.
There are several recipes I brought from my trip to Armenia still waiting to be uploaded.
The procedure is usually the following: we sit down on a sofa with my laptop and my son chooses a dish by a photo. And the next day we cook it after buying all ingredients necessary.
This time my son has chosen this splendid Rum Baba: a great dessert on the Christmas Eve. One can enjoy it with a bottle of fine wine (but don’t give it to your child, OK?).
[Recipe]
Ingredients
Dough ingredients:
- 150 g flour
- 6 g fresh (pressed) yeast
- 65 g milk
- 2 eggs
- 60 g raisins
- 20 g sugar
- 20 g rum
- 35 g butter
Syrup:
- 1 l water
- 500 g sugar
- 100 g rum
- 1 vanilla bean
- Mint
Instructions
- Prepare syrup first and then allow it to cool down, because hot rum baba shall be put in cold syrup.
- To prepare syrup, put water in a saucepan, add sugar, vanilla and mint.
- Bring to the boil, cook for 4-5 minutes, put aside to cool down.
- To prepare dough, mix all dry ingredients together (flour, sugar, salt) and put in a deep bowl.
- Warm the milk up to30ºC (86ºF), add yeast, eggs, rum and mix thoroughly.
- Add liquid composition to flour and mix for 15 minutes.
- The dough shall be elastic and not sticky.
- Finally, add butter previously warmed up to room temperature and cut in small pieces.
- Leave dough in a warm place (up to 40ºC, 104ºF) for 1 hour.
- After the dough has risen and become 3 times bigger, punch it down and put into baking cups (either silicone or metal).
- Leave the dough to rise once more (it will take about 20-30 minutes) and put into the oven for 35 minutes at 180ºC (356ºF).
- Babas shall become golden brown.
- Take hot pastry out of the forms and put immediately in cooled syrup.
- Turn babas over from time to time and syrup them, allowing syrup to soak in.
- Then put pastry on a metal grid, allowing extra syrup to drain away.
- Rum baba is best served well cooled with berries and mint syrup in a plate.
- And bon appetite! ... With love :)