Bake 52 Rewind Week #9: Babka

I'm continuing my quest to work through the Bake 52 recipes from the first of last year.  I'd never heard of Babka before.  I didn't even remember the Sienfield episode with it until I read Michelle's post for this recipe.  But when I saw that there was a chocolate version I knew that when I made this I was going to make it Chocolate!!

The dough has to chill for up to 10 hours.  So I started this on Saturday and finished it up on Sunday.  The dough wasn't really difficult but it was just about more than my stand mixer could handle!  The wet ingredients include sour cream, eggs, water and vanilla.  This  is not a low fat/calorie dish!

I mixed all that together and then moved on to the dry ingredients.

I weighed out the flour and sugar.  Then added in the yeast and the salt.

 

I added the sour cream mix to the flour mix.  The two together were just about too much for my mixer.

Then came the weirdest part...adding the butter.  With my mixer already overloaded, the butter mostly just smeared around the side of the pan.  It took a lot of time to get it all mixed in (sort of).  I also had to add all the extra flour the recipe indicates as well to get the butter to combine and the dough to pull together. 

At that point the dough went in the frig overnight.  The next day I got started on the filling first.  I found a chocolate babka recipe at Smitten Kitchen here. 

Chocolate...  Lots of chocolate - 24 ounces!

Since I was chopping up the chocolate I thought it would be fun to have three different kinds - milk, semi-sweet & bittersweet.  I spent some time trying to get all the pieces reasonably small but I didn't run them through my food processor the way Deb did.  I wanted to keep the pieces a little bit bigger so you could taste the individual flavors of chocolate. 

Next step was to mix the chocolate with 2/3 cup sugar, 2 Tbsp cinnamon, and one cup room temperature butter.  



It took awhile but it eventually started to clump together.  Next step (hardest for me!) was rolling the dough out. 

I have no idea what the trick is to get something nicely rectangular.  I trimmed off one of the edges (the left) and gave the excess to Jonathan.  He'd snagged a piece of the dough before it went into the refrigerator and said that it was the best dough he'd ever had.  He'd been bugging me all Sunday for more dough.  I guess I could have trimmed up the whole piece and gave the excess to Jonathan but I was pretty sure that would make Jonathan sick!

I spread the chocolate mix all over the dough to within about a half inch of the narrowest edges.  Then I used my bench scraper to roll it up nice and tight.  I didn't get a picture of the roll but it worked out pretty well and the uneven edges didn't seem to be a problem.  I used a serrated knife to cut the roll in slices.

My loaf pans were a bit smaller than what the recipe called for (8x4" instead of 9x5"), so I ended up overlapping the piecies quite a bit. 

Jonathan never thought I'd get the whole roll in the two pans, but with some squishing I got almost the whole roll in.  I let the dough sit for a couple of hours.  I didn't see any appreciable rising, but I was running out of day so I went ahead and brushed on the egg wash/glaze and got the bread in the oven.

The bread got a bit dark even though I tented the bread half way through when I rotated the loaves.

I didn't wait two hours to have a piece...

It was so yummy but so rich/dense!  I actually wanted a second piece that night but I couldn't finish it... That is really unusual for me.  I saved the last of the second piece to have as my pre-work out snack the next morning.  Then I had another piece when I got to work!  This was irresistible. 

I put the two loaves on a cutting board and took them to work.  It was so dense/heavy that when I lifted it out of my car to take it into work I could barely lift it with one hand.  :-)  Thankfully for my hips by the time I came in to get a second glass of water (about three hours after leaving the bread in the break room) it was completely gone.  I probably won't make this again, just because it was too irresistible.  I try to avoid things I can't stop eating.  :-)

The calorie workup below is based on 32 servings or about one of the slices from the roll if you end up with 32 pieces.  That's pretty high calorie for one little roll, another reason not to make this again.  Although, it would be a great dish if you are trying to impress someone, and it's certaintly something you should try.  Just make sure you have plenty of people to spread the joy (calories).  :-)