Babka
The baking adventures continued with this interesting dessert bread. I found this recipe for pumpkin rye chocolate babka while searching for interesting ways to use up a large bag of rye flour that I bought. In the meantime, my parents watched an episode of the Great British Bake Off in which the contestants had to make povitica. There are some similarities between babka and povitica, not least is that it has pretty swirls between the bread and filling when you slice it. So, we had to try one of them and we did the babka.
Well, everything went mostly well with making the dough, though I had to use almost a full cup more of flour than the recipe called for in order to keep the dough from being too sticky to handle (about an extra 3/4 c. AP flour and 1/4 c. rye flour). Perhaps this is because I used fresh pumpkin puree which is a bit wetter than the canned stuff. I'm also not sure if that is why my bread was less orange than that in the pictures on the site where I found it.
Still, it made a beautiful dough. Spreading the chocolate filling out was a little difficult. It wasn't very spreadable, so I had to crumble it out and then use a rolling pin to make it relatively flat so I could roll the dough up. The good news is that chocolate melts, so while it was baking, it filled in the cracks nicely.
It already looked really cool when I twisted it up and put it into the pan. I chose not to put the streusel on top because I think it's easier to eat bread without a crumbly topping.
We were very thankful that we put parchment paper in the pan because it made it super easy to remove the bread when it was done. Also, we let the bread cool in the pan for the full two hours that the recipe suggested and it held up really well when we took it out.
The only problem when slicing the bread was that the day I made it was a hot day so even after the bread was fully cool, the chocolate was still melty (but it didn't affect the taste). Also, the slice in the photo above is from the end of the bread, so it isn't as pretty as it was when you got further into the loaf (see below). But it was a really good dessert, I thought!
Well, everything went mostly well with making the dough, though I had to use almost a full cup more of flour than the recipe called for in order to keep the dough from being too sticky to handle (about an extra 3/4 c. AP flour and 1/4 c. rye flour). Perhaps this is because I used fresh pumpkin puree which is a bit wetter than the canned stuff. I'm also not sure if that is why my bread was less orange than that in the pictures on the site where I found it.
Still, it made a beautiful dough. Spreading the chocolate filling out was a little difficult. It wasn't very spreadable, so I had to crumble it out and then use a rolling pin to make it relatively flat so I could roll the dough up. The good news is that chocolate melts, so while it was baking, it filled in the cracks nicely.
It already looked really cool when I twisted it up and put it into the pan. I chose not to put the streusel on top because I think it's easier to eat bread without a crumbly topping.
We were very thankful that we put parchment paper in the pan because it made it super easy to remove the bread when it was done. Also, we let the bread cool in the pan for the full two hours that the recipe suggested and it held up really well when we took it out.
The only problem when slicing the bread was that the day I made it was a hot day so even after the bread was fully cool, the chocolate was still melty (but it didn't affect the taste). Also, the slice in the photo above is from the end of the bread, so it isn't as pretty as it was when you got further into the loaf (see below). But it was a really good dessert, I thought!
This was really tasty! I still have a few pieces of it in the freezer for a special snack.
ReplyDelete