A few years ago I conquered one of the seven wonders of my culinary world chocolate babka. Babka if you’re new to it poor you is a brioche-like sweet yeast cake that’s usually rolled out thinly and wrapped around a filling of chocolate cinnamon sweet cheese or fruit and often studded with streusel. And I know most people save their exuberant prose for eight-inch lemon meringue pie or brownies with swirls of peanut butter candied bacon and chocolate bars inside. I know most people had never heard of babka before it became a joke but Alex and I fondly remember the supermarket chocolate babkas—the endless spirals of dark chocolate covered in them—from our childhoods and I couldn’t rest until I cracked the code at home.
| Channel | Publish Date | Thumbnail & View Count | Actions |
|---|---|---|---|
 Donal Skehan | 2016-07-31 09:00:00 |  181,409 Views |
How to make… Chocolate Swirl Buns!
Martha Stewart made it easy because her late mother’s chocolate babka is the best there is and not just because it has intricate swirls pebbles of streusel and a dash of cinnamon that it simply can’t do without. No her version won all the awards because it was completely and utterly borderline indecently overloaded with chocolate. The chocolate-to-dough ratio is staggering. It’s… indecent. It’s… kind of miraculous.
But it still has its limitations. We may dunk 2 1/2 pounds of chocolate 1 1/4 pounds of butter over a pound of sugar and two pounds of flour into three greased loaf pans a few times in our lives in the name of nostalgia and some truly decadent fun but we certainly don’t do it often or we’d have to be evicted from our homes. I haven’t made it once since then and that makes us sad.
I found the solution to this crisis — is the infrequent appearance of homemade chocolate babka in your life a crisis? Probably not. People might quip about your First World Problems and not take you very seriously. That’s fine but then they won’t get any babka at all — on the way home from the playground one day Jacob and I stumbled across a shoebox of a cute new bakery that looks like a grandmother’s living room and doesn’t sell. any. cupcakes. Instead it focuses on Israeli European and Moroccan pastries. Inside they sell something fantastical called chocolate “roses” that look exactly like chocolate babkas baked individually in muffin cups. With a little encouragement from a recent coffee date I knew exactly what to do: do the math. And do a little retesting.
