Rum Baba

Rum babas have a reputation for being hard to bake, and indeed if you look around you can find some really intricate recipes. But, having tried a few, frankly, I've never found the extra complexity to be worth it. At the end of the day, it's a sponge cake with run syrup, whipped cream, and rum. Don't overthink it — especially after the rum.

Cake

• 1 packet of yeast (7g)
• 150g sugar
• 50g butter
• 120g flour
• 3 tbsp milk
• 3 eggs

Syrup

• 10cl of dark rum (e.g. JM's VO)
• 25cl water
• 25cl cane syrup (you can replace this with more or less an equivalent volume of sugar)

Whipped Cream

• heavy cream
• sugar

You'll also need a fair bit of rum left to serve.

1. Pre-heat oven at 180C°.
2. Separate the yolks from the whites and whip the yolks in with the sugar until the mix turns whitish. Keep the whites handy.
3. Melt the butter in a bowl along with the milk.
4. Mix the molten butter, milk, flour, and yeast into the yolks and sugar.
5. Separately, whip the egg whites until stiff, then veeeery gently fold that into the batter.
6. Put the batter into a round cake tin with a hole in the middle (so as to make a toroid cake) or individual small cakes (maybe cupcake size) and bake that in the oven for 25 minutes.
7. While the cake bakes, put the water, rum, and cane syrup into a saucepan and bring them to a simmering boil. Let it reduce, stirring regularly, until it becomes syrupy. Careful that you don't let this go too long or it'll just burn.
8. Remove the cake, unmold it onto a plate with a rim, and pour the syrup all over, making sure the cake is well covered.
9. Now mix the heavy cream and sugar together and whip them into whipped cream. This works best if you whip them in a cold bowl — it can come out of the freezer, some people place the bowl in a larger bowl that has ice in it. You can also use industrial whipped cream, but I recommend making your own, you won't regret it.
10. Serve the cake with whipped cream and douse heavily with dark rum, as per taste.