While living in California the Manhattan has been my most favourite cocktail, and the apartment has been stocked with the necessary ingredients at all times, which I suppose is why my rum babas ended up as Manhattan babas. They did not disappoint.  You could make the more traditional version instead, or dream up another.  I think an Old Fashioned Baba would be delicious too… 

The baba, by the way, gets its name from the babka, a related Eastern European cake.  Baba means grannie / old woman, and babka means little grannie / old woman, yet the babka is almost always a bigger cake than the baba.  Bizarre but true.  We might have to go to Eastern Europe to get to the bottom of this linguistic culinary puzzle.  I think we'll drive there, after Christmas.