Rum Babas: Test 2

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Source

Rum babas

Total time: 2 1/2 hours

Yield: 12 small cakes

Equipment

Medium bowl
Rubber spatula
3 Tbsp cookie scoop
Mini bunt pan with 12 wells
Sauce pan

Ingredients

Babas

220g bread flour
7g yeast
1/2 tsp salt
50g granulated sugar
2 large eggs
1/4 cup milk
100g butter, softened

Rum Syrup

1/4 cup rum
200g water
220g granulated sugar

Instructions

Babas

1. The flour and sugar were combined in the bowl of a standing mixer along with the salt and yeast, added on opposite sides of the bowl to avoid too much direct contact. I am not sure if this is really significant but some people say that salt can retard the yeast’s activity and so avoiding direct contact is good. I have never seen this to be a problem with dry yeast personally. The ingredients were then mixed together.
2. In a separate bowl, the milk and eggs were whisked until homogeneous.
3. The egg mixture was added to the flour mixture and mixed using a dough hook on medium low speed. This dough will be very sticky and so lends itself better to mixing with the dough hook than by hand. I allowed to mixer to run for 10 minutes until the dough looked smooth and elastic.
4. I added the butter to the dough with the mixer running and let the mixer knead the dough until smooth and shiny again.
5. The dough was allowed to rise for an hour and a half until doubled in size.
6. The oven was heated to 350 degrees F
7. Once risen, the dough was mixed again to release the air and divided into the mini bunt cake molds. My mold holds 12 individual bunts. These are quite small. Each can hold about 3 Tablespoons of batter. A 3 Tbsp scoop is very useful here and dividing the dough with a scoop means the cakes are more even and have fewer seams where the dough meets.
8. Once doled out, the dough was allow to rise again until molds were filled nearly to the top.
9. They were bake for 20 minutes.

Rum Syrup

1. All of the ingredients were added to a small pot and brought to a rolling boil.
2. The syrup was then cooled to room temperature.

Assembly

1. When everything is cooled and ready to be assembled, I aided the syrup saturation by pricking the bottoms of the cakes with a fork and then letting the cakes absorb half of the syrup before flipping and repeating. I let my cakes then strain on a cooling rack for an hour before packaging them away.
2. You can top these cakes as you please. Options include whipped cream and fruit or just fruit compote. There are nearly endless possibilities here but I opted for simle whipped cream and some canned and fresh peaches with a sprig of mint.

Notebook

Rum Baba