The baba is often served at Easter in Poland, with the most extraordinary version – the muslin baba – made from a rich dough of flour, yeast, butter and quite a lot of egg yolks.

Depending on where it's baked, the baba or babka takes on many different forms. In the US, it's a braided brioche-like bread that often has chocolate, nuts or other ingredients mixed in. Europeans might be more familiar with baba au rhum, a desert popular in France and Italy that is soaked in liqueur and served in individual portions.

But in Poland, the word "baba" can refer to a variety of baked goods. Some are made in Bundt pans, while others are loaf shaped. Some are more bread-like and use yeast while others more closely resemble pound cake, like the lemon baba I made for my son's birthday. And some, like the potato babka so popular in Poland's Podlasie region, are savoury instead of sweet.

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The typical yeasted baba is often served at Easter and added to the Easter basket brought to church to be blessed, with the most extraordinary version being the muslin baba named for muslin cloth because of its lightness. It's made from a rich dough that contains flour, butter, yeast and a lot of egg yolks – 96 of them for every kilogram of flour.

One food website says to "take a deep breath", as the home version of the muslin baba recipe calls for just 250g of flour, so you will only need 24 egg yolks. By contrast, the Easter baba recipe I usually make contains six egg yolks for 500g of flour (or 12 egg yolks per kilogram), and I already consider that to be a lot.

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The original recipe for muslin baba is often credited to the 19th-Century food writer and journalist Lucyna Ćwierczakiewiczowa, an extremely popular and successful cookbook writer at the time. I came across the recipe in two other cookbooks: Jak Gotować (How to Cook) by Maria Disslowa, first published in 1931, and then again in Old Polish Traditions in the Kitchen and at the Table (published in 1979) by Maria Lemnis and Henryk Vitry, both pseudonyms of Polish musicologist Tadeusz Żakiej, which provides fascinating insights into the life and traditions of pre-war Poland.

"The cook, the lady of the house and all the women locked themselves up in the kitchen," Żakiej writes. "They sieved the whitest of flours, mixed hundreds of egg yolks with sugar in clay bowls, dissolved saffron in vodka."

This is not the easiest........

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