Chocolate Babka

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!

Coffee-Anise Stars

These are a coffee lover’s treat…it even smelled like I was making coffee when I was baking them!

I am not a coffee lover, so I had to defer to all my taster’s reactions…who all love coffee…and they absolutely loved these cookies!!

Made with a mixture of espresso powder, cinnamon, ginger (the optional sub for anise powder), and molasses…these have quite a depth of flavor. When I tried a bite of one, the coffee hit me first, but then came a second layer/round of spice flavor that was so good and really unexpected since the coffee is pretty dominant…and then the sweet icing to round it off. Even not caring for the coffee so much, it was enticing me back for another bite.

These would be a wonderful addition to any holiday platter, or really any cookie platter all year long. Based on everyone’s reactions, I think these would be a winner at any time.

I did use a different glaze as I wasn’t sure what the purpose of the raw egg whites it called for were…and I never like to use uncooked eggs. I do think my icing wasn’t as pretty..the coverage seemed weird, but I don’t think the flavor was lacking haha.

This one is a keeper!

Holiday Fish Soup

Fish Soup

Can’t really recall having a fish soup, or using the technique of cooking down a broth and then straining away all the ingredients used to make it taste so good. I think it would have been fine to leave them all in. 🤷‍♀️😂

The broth is made from a variety of ingredients: scallions, garlic, shallot, ginger, strip of lime zest, lemongrass, and chili pepper all lending themselves to the flavor that will surround the fish. The lemongrass was elusive again so I omitted that, and had to make the suggested substitution of Thai red curry paste for the red yuzu kosho…also elusive. All of that is blended in with white wine and chicken broth, brought to a boil and allowed to simmer. After cooking for 20 this broth mixture is strained to discard the solids and end up with a clear broth.

To this we add:

Fish-among the suggestions: mussels, white fish, shrimp- both deveined and head-on. (I went with Mahi and double the amount of deveined shrimp)

Vegetables-scallions, mushroom, shallot, sweet potato, and spinach …topped with seaweed if desired…which we did!

The soup we are told, is heavy on the fish and light on the broth…I think we had plenty of both, but probably less servings than what it called for, but that was fine. We enjoyed the soup…my husband likening it to miso soup with fish in it 🤷‍♀️. We thought it was really good, but at the same time nothing special. I am not sure I would make it again since it did require a few more steps than just an easy on the table type of soup….if I was to make it again, I think I would skip the straining step..I think some more garlic, shallot, etc would be just fine haha.