Rum baba: a boozy, make-ahead pudding

The rum baba sits somewhere between a cake and a pudding: made from an enriched, yeasted dough, full of butter, called savarin, which is like a very dry brioche. It isn’t quite as enriched as brioche and, after baking, it can be left to stale, and dry out further, which means that when it’s soaked in the sweet boozy syrup, it will drink up even more. Savarin dough can be used to make enormous bundt cakes, often decorated with fresh cream and fruit, but I have a soft spot for the individual baba. Once soaked, they are squidgy and extremely alcoholic – put it this way, I wouldn’t want to drive after eating one.

The cakes are usually topped with whipped cream or pastry cream, with fresh fruit perched on top, bare delightful picked up and eaten in their simple state, residual syrup licked from sticky fingers.

The classic soaking syrup for a baba is made with rum: the smokey, caramel tones of rum work well with the sweet cakes without the fumes hitting the back of your nose and making you gasp. But, of course, the technique remains the same no matter what you use for soaking. If you’re swapping booze, lean towards the sweet rather than the lighter fuel: try amaretto, ginger wine, Drambuie or Frangelico, leave the gin and vodka in the cupboard. You can eschew alcohol entirely, if you’d rather: add a ribbon of lemon zest or orange peel to your syrup, a piece of star anise and some cinnamon bark, or an earl grey tea bag, and let the cake soak up your beautiful chosen flavours. Once, in a happy accident (of thinking I had rum in the house when I didn’t) I used some triple sec in place of the rum which was left over from an enthusiastic margarita phase.