Babà

Babà is an enriched yeast dough, closer to brioche than to cake, with so much egg and butter that it is almost pourable before baking. It goes into flared moulds that give it the mushroom shape, or one large ring mould, and it is not finished when it comes out of the oven. It has to dry, sometimes for a full day, and only then is it dipped in hot syrup of water, sugar and dark rum.

The engineering matters. Long mixing builds a strong gluten network; proving fills that network with small, even cells; drying empties those cells of moisture; soaking refills them with syrup. A babà is not a wet cake, it is a sponge built on purpose, and its quality is measured by how much liquid it holds while still standing up.

The Neapolitan default is the single-portion mushroom, eight to ten centimetres tall, with a cap that overhangs. There is also a large ring version brought whole to the table and filled with cream, and the pastry-shop bestseller filled with crème pâtissière, whipped cream and a syrupy sour cherry.

One relative catches visitors off guard: the babà rustico, a savoury version with cured meats and cheese worked into the dough, no sugar and no syrup, eaten in Naples at Easter and at parties.

Rum, warm bread and butter, in that order. The first bite releases syrup, so the immediate impression is liquid and sweet, with the alcohol reading as caramel and vanilla rather than as spirit, because most of it has cooked off. Underneath is the flavour of a very rich brioche: egg yolk, butter, a trace of citrus zest from the syrup.

The texture is the point. A good babà collapses slightly when you press it and springs back, and every mouthful is wet without being soggy. The cap is a little firmer and slightly chewy where it caught colour in the oven; the base is the wettest part.

Sweetness is high but should stop short of cloying. When a babà tastes syrupy and one-note, the syrup was too heavy on sugar and too light on rum, or the pastry was soaked before it had dried properly: a wet crumb cannot take up flavour, only water.

Serve at room temperature. A babà straight from the fridge is a waste of a babà: below about fifteen degrees the butter in the dough sets hard and the aromatics in the syrup stop volatilising. Take it out half an hour ahead.

If you are soaking your own, the temperature rule is counter-intuitive but reliable: cold cake, hot syrup. Bring the syrup to the boil with citrus zest, let it fall to around sixty degrees, add the rum off the heat so the alcohol survives, then submerge the dry babà for three to five minutes, pressing it gently under. Lift it out, let it drain, brush it with warmed apricot jam.

To fill, cut a slit in the cap and pipe in crème pâtissière lightened with whipped cream, then top with a syrupy amarena cherry. In summer Naples uses cream and strawberries instead.

The large ring version is a centrepiece: bring it out whole, fill the middle with cream and fruit, cut it into wedges at the table. And a broken babà is not a failure: crumble it into a glass with cream and fruit and you have an improvised trifle.

The trade rule is to keep them dry rather than soaked. An unsoaked baked babà holds about a week in a tin at room temperature and three months in the freezer, and it takes five minutes in warm syrup when you want it, which is how pastry shops actually work. Once soaked, the clock is short. Two days under a dome at room temperature, three or four in the fridge if it is filled with cream, which then wants bringing back to room temperature before serving. Across those days the crumb keeps releasing syrup and slowly settles.

Sealed jars of babà in syrup sit in the cupboard to the date printed on the lid. Once opened they go in the fridge and are generally given a few days, with the cakes kept fully under the syrup, since anything standing above the line dries and darkens. Soaked babà can be frozen, but they come back changed: the syrup separates as it thaws and the cake sags. One that has dried out can be worked back: warm some syrup, dip it for two or three minutes, then let it rest half an hour.

Press the top with the back of a spoon. A babà should give, release a little syrup and come back up. If it stays flat it has drunk too much; if it does not give at all the centre is dry, the standard fault where a bakery is in a hurry. Cut one open: the crumb should be fine, close and regular, deep yellow from the eggs right through to the middle. Big irregular holes point to mishandled proving, and a paler, drier core means the syrup never reached it.

Smell it before you buy. Real rum reads as alcohol and cane sugar with vanilla and wood behind it, while synthetic flavouring is sharper and sweeter and stays in the mouth afterwards. The top should look glossy but feel dry to the fingertip: tacky usually means apricot glaze laid on thick over a crust that had dried. On shelves abroad the neighbours are French baba au rhum and the ring shaped savarin, both from the same dough, and Caribbean rum cake, a butter cake with rum poured over it. Jars of babà in syrup run about $10 to $18.

In Naples, from any serious pasticceria, and ask whether they will sell you babà secchi, the dry unsoaked shells, if you are travelling. They keep for a week in a tin and three months in the freezer, and you soak them at home in five minutes.

In the US and UK, Italian pastry shops in cities with a Neapolitan community are the only reliable source of the fresh article; elsewhere you are choosing between jarred babà from Italian importers and specialist online bakers who ship overnight. Expect roughly 12 to 22 dollars a pound in the US and 18 to 30 pounds a kilo in the UK.

What to check on jarred products: the ingredient list should say rum, not rum flavouring, and butter should appear before vegetable oil. Anything sold as 'rum baba' in a British supermarket is usually the French style, with a looser, wetter crumb.

Naples, and it is worth making a short route of it. Gran Caffè Gambrinus on piazza Trieste e Trento is the historic stand-at-the-bar option, coffee and babà in four minutes. On Spaccanapoli, Scaturchio in piazza San Domenico Maggiore is one of the oldest pastry shops in the city.

The Rione Sanità is where Neapolitan pastry is most alive right now, and worth the walk regardless of what you order.

On the Amalfi Coast and in Sorrento you will find the limoncello version, syrup made with lemon liqueur instead of rum. It is recent and aimed at visitors, and it is genuinely good when the lemons are the local Sfusato.

And in Paris, the shop Nicolas Stohrer founded in 1730 on rue Montorgueil still sells the baba au rhum, the missing link between Lorraine and Naples, and the reason the Neapolitan version exists at all.