Savarin and Rum Baba

The rum baba was created (in one version) by Stanisław Leszczyński, the exiled King of Poland, in 18th-century Lorraine — he is said to have moistened a dried kugelhopf with rum and named it after Ali Baba. The savarin (a later, ring-moulded variation) was created and named by Paris patissiers after the great gastronomist Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin. Both remain fundamental preparations of the classical French pastry kitchen.

A yeasted enriched cake baked in a ring mould (savarin) or individual tall cylindrical moulds (baba), then soaked — fully submerged, not merely brushed — in a rum or Kirsch sugar syrup until each cell of the crumb is saturated, then filled with crème Chantilly and fruit. The saturation is the technique: a correctly soaked baba absorbs 3–4 times its own weight in syrup, becoming simultaneously lighter than a plain cake (the alcohol and syrup open the crumb) and richer. A baba that is merely brushed is not a baba.

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