Rum Babas

This light yeast cake, studded with raisins and soaked in rum syrup, originated in seventeenth-century Poland—where, as the story goes, King Stanislas Leczyinski, finding his gugelhupf too dry, moistened it with syrup. He named his invention Ali Baba after the character in his favorite story, the classic “Thousand and One Nights.” When the dessert was later introduced to the West, apparently by a French pâtissier who came across it among members of the Polish court who were