Chocolate and Hazelnut Babka!
Chocolate Babka... where to start with this one...
After shaping the dough it was time to plait it. The roll is first sliced in half vertically, and the exposed layers are turned to face upwards. The majority of my difficulty came from not owning the proper tools here. My knives weren't the sharpest, and dragged the dough before cutting through it, displacing the layers and dragging them apart. For my latest attempt I bought a pizza wheel, which helped massively.
The finished result was a little under baked. When a piece of the dough from the centre was squished between two fingers it wasn't as springy as it could have been, and instead stayed mostly squished together, but it still tasted fantastic! Chocolate and hazelnut is another of those flavour combinations that I just can't get enough of.
My final product on my third attempt wasn't half bad, but it sure took some time and effort to get there! This bake was haunting me for weeks before I finally got it right! I was on a little bit of a patisserie/pastry baking mission, having just made cinnamon roles, cardamom buns and palmiers, so babka felt like the perfect challenge!
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| Chocolate and Hazelnut Babka! |
Making the dough was the easy part, thanks to Veronica (if I haven't mentioned already Veronica is my stand mixer, named after Tony Stark's "Hulkbuster" satellite in Avengers: Age of Ultron! Geeky, I know). The dough is relatively simple, and is enriched with butter, eggs, and whole milk.
Whilst the dough was proofing for the first time, I had time to prepare the filling. I have absolutely no idea what the mixture for the filling is called, if it even has a name at all, but it is also simple to prepare. I simply had to combine butter, caster sugar and dark chocolate in a pan until all the butter and chocolate was melted and the sugar had dissolved, before stirring in the cocoa powder. So far so good.
The method became a little more complicated from here. After knocking back the proofed dough, I rolled the dough out into a very large rectangle. The filling is then spread over the rectangle, and roasted hazelnuts are sprinkled on top. The dough is then rolled up from the long edge into a tight spiral. Twice I made the mistake of rolling from the shorter edge, meaning it was incredibly difficult to plait the babka (note to self, read the method properly!).
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| An important lesson from Edan Leshnick's YouTube channel, "you can't recover from a bad roll"! |
After shaping the dough it was time to plait it. The roll is first sliced in half vertically, and the exposed layers are turned to face upwards. The majority of my difficulty came from not owning the proper tools here. My knives weren't the sharpest, and dragged the dough before cutting through it, displacing the layers and dragging them apart. For my latest attempt I bought a pizza wheel, which helped massively.
The two strips of dough are then twisted into a plait, so that the filling is exposed on the top. I learned the hard way that it is important to maintain a tight plait without stretching the dough, as one of my babkas stretched and tore as a result of my rough handling.
The final proof then takes place in a loaf tin to give the loaf its distinctive shape. Mini loaf tins could also be used at this stage to bake several babkas, which is something I'm keen to try soon. Another tip I learned from Edan's YouTube tutorial is that if you're halving the plait to make several loafs, a good way to measure (if you don't have a ruler, obviously), is to put one hand at either end of the plait and clap. The point where your hands meet should be the midpoint. It really works!
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To produce this babka I combined recipes from the first Jane's Patisserie book, and from Paul Hollywood's method in the Love to Bake cookbook. Jane's recipe called for a chocolate and cherry filling, but I preferred to go with Paul's hazelnut filling instead!
As soon as I find myself a nice mini loaf tin I'll be trying my hand at smaller babkas, just imagine how cute they'd be!
Gibby x
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