Rum Baba

Flour here is just plain flour, nothing strong or "bread" about it — you want a slack, open crumb, not chew, so a lower-protein flour that gives less gluten development is actually doing you a favour. The yeast is the real engine of the texture: it's not there for flavour so much as for the bubbles, which is why this is a proper wet, pipeable batter rather than a dough you'd knead on a worktop. If your kitchen runs cool — and a British kitchen in winter often does — give the prove more than the stated half hour and judge it by eye: the batter should have visibly domed and loosened in the mould, not just "sat there for 30 minutes." Time is the minimum, not the target.

The eggs and the softened butter carry fat and richness, but notice how little butter there is compared to a real brioche — 50g against 125g flour. That's deliberate; too much fat would seal the crumb and block the syrup from getting in, so the baba stays leaner than you'd expect from something that ends up tasting indulgent. The milk is just there to loosen the egg mixture so it combines smoothly with the flour — if you're out of milk, water will do the same job, you lose a little softness in the crumb but not much.

For moulds, dedicated baba or savarin tins give you that classic ring shape with even heat all round, but in an ordinary flat kitchen a muffin tin or small individual pudding moulds work fine — anything that lets heat reach the batter from most sides and lets you unmould it without a fight. Grease it properly; nothing ruins the open structure faster than tearing the baba apart trying to prise it out.

The syrup is just sugar dissolved in water with lemon zest boiled through it — the zest is for aromatic oil, not acidity, so strain it out before use, as the recipe says, or you'll get bitter pith flavour sitting in your rum bath. Any neutral sugar works; caster dissolves fastest, which matters here because you want a clear syrup, not a cloudy one with undissolved crystals that won't penetrate the crumb evenly. The rum goes in off the heat, after boiling, because alcohol boiled directly in the syrup simply cooks away — you want it still present to both flavour and further loosen the soaked crumb. If you want a version without the alcohol hit, you can rebuild the syrup with a dash of vanilla or more zest, but understand you're making a different, blander dessert at that point — the rum isn't a flourish here, it's named in the dish for a reason.

The jam brushed on at the end is purely for shine and a thin seal — any smooth jam with no big fruit chunks will do, warmed slightly so it brushes on thin rather than globbing. Apricot is the classic because it's pale and doesn't fight the colour or flavour of the syrup, but this step is cosmetic, not structural — skip it and the baba tastes the same, it just looks a bit duller on the plate.

For eight people you want eight individual babas, one each, because this isn't a cake you slice and share — the whole point is a self-contained sponge soaked right through, and a single large one would soak unevenly at the edges versus the centre, giving you the same dry-core problem as an underproved one. Small and individual is not tradition for tradition's sake; it's the only way the soaking mechanism works reliably.