THIS was a labor of love…and completely worth all the time it took to make…it was absolutely delicious!
Any recipe that uses a Brioche dough as the base, is going to take time…roughly two days and many rising and chilling cycles. The Brioche dough makes two loaves…so instead of making one of the other recipes with the second, I went ahead and made two Chocolate Babkas, and right now I am thinking I was pretty smart because it was that good. I have the second one all wrapped up tightly in the freezer to be brought out for Christmas breakfast!
The dough is a mixture of flour, yeast, sugar, milk, water, and eggs and after it comes together the 2 sticks of butter are added bit by bit to be absorbed into the dough…we are told this takes about 10 min and it was right on the money.
The dough then begins its first of two rises before getting a chill where you lift the dough every 30 min for two hours…remember I said it was labor intensive. 😳 After the last lift, the dough chills overnight in preparation for baking the next day.
The filling can be made ahead of time, but I just did it as I was prepping the dough. It is made up of melted butter, both sugars, cinnamon, flour, cocoa, and salt. This sits to cool while the dough is cut into two and each rolled into a 16×16. The filling is spread out on the dough. The dough is rolled, cut, and braided and put into the loaf pan for another rise.
While the dough is rising, the streusel can be made…which needs an hour chill time. This is fairly easy and made up of flour, both sugars, cinnamon, butter and vanilla….mixed until it forms clumps.
After the loaf has doubled in size, it is given a egg white wash and covered in streusel.
The Babka is baked for 50 min, although both the baking and rising times for me were much longer than the recipe stated. I was glad we were told to look for volume in the rising and the 200 degrees in the bread to know when either was done. I would have been wrong on both without the extra instruction.
This smelled extremely good while baking, and was so hard not to eat as soon as it came out of the oven.
While this was one of the more time consuming recipes we have made…with many steps and resting periods, it really was one of the most delicious and fulfilling. It was totally worth it.
This one is a keeper!