Skip to main content
Dessert

Babas with Kibsch

Babas with Kirsch are yeast buns filled with butter, currants, sultanas, sugar, lemon rind, and eggs, topped with a kirsch syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Babas with Kibsch

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderately hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a moderately hot oven”. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Make the dough

  1. Sift the flour into a large bowl.

  2. Make a hole in the center of the sifted flour.

  3. Mix the yeast with a little tepid water. Add the yeast mixture to the hole in the flour.

  4. Let the mixture stand for about 30 minutes.

  5. Add the creamed butter, currants, sultanas, sugar, lemon rind, salt, and eggs. Beat the mixture until smooth.

  6. Cover the mixture with a cloth. Let the mixture rise until nearly doubled in size.

Shape and bake

  1. Butter some timbale molds.

  2. Fill the molds halfway with the mixture. Let the filled molds rise until nearly full.

  3. Bake in a moderate oven at 350°F (175°C).

Soak and serve

  1. Boil the sugar and water until syrup forms. Flavor the syrup with kirschwasser.

  2. Pour the syrup over the babas. Dip the babas in the syrup before serving.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  5. Butter + curranttop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,856 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Fine flour
Forms the dough's structure once its proteins bond and set in the oven.
Yeast
Ferments the dough, producing gas that makes it rise and gives it an airy crumb.
Eggs
Add structure, richness and moisture, helping the crumb set and stay tender.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a tender, soft crumb.
Loaf sugar
Dissolves into the syrup that sweetens and moistens the babas after baking.

The step that matters

Let the dough rise until nearly doubled. Yeast gas expands the dough to create the airy crumb. Rising too little leaves the babas dense, while over-proofing can collapse them in the oven.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, butter, sugar, egg, lemon):

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, butter, sugar, egg, lemon. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipesRed Currant JellyRed Currant Jelly65 recipes