=Chocolate Blobka=

(chocolate blobka)

How Not to Make a Chocolate Babka and Still Have it Come Out Pretty Darn Ok.

I could probably write a book about how not to do things. Most of the time, though, things work themselves out okay in spite of my bewildered incompetence. Like my recent attempt to bake a chocolate babka, which I ended up re-christening more appropriately as a chocolate blobka.

All's well that ends well, though. My husband kept slicing off pieces of the thing and it barely survived its second day of existence, which is the only validation I need to deem this baking foray a mitigated failure/success.

So here's now not to bake a chocolate babka.

First off, don't use the correct ingredients. The recipe calls for one cup of bread flour and one cup of all-purpose flour. I didn't have the bread flour, so I used two cups of all-purpose flour.

Be sure, too, not to have the correct tools for the job. I don't have a stand mixer with a dough hook or a pastry blender. Who needs them, right? After all, I'm sure they didn't have any stand mixers with dough hooks in the shtetls of Eastern Europe where the Jewish version of this cake is thought to have originated. I'll bet anything they didn't pack pastry blenders when the Jews loaded up wagons and headed out of Egypt during the Exodus. You don't need a hammer to drive a nail. There's more than one way to skin a badger. Etc.

Anyway, without the proper ingredients or the proper tools, you're off to a good start in fucking up your babka. 

Next what you want to do is not proof the yeast. 

Now I'm not sure if you are supposed to proof the yeast or not. The recipe I was using didn't say to do it, so I didn't. But the dough never did "double in size" after an hour and a half like it was supposed to do. If anything, it seemed to get smaller. When I went to work the "air out of it," I felt like I was kneading a flat tire. 

If you get this effect, congratulations! You, too, are doing it the wrong way!

Okay, so now on to the recipe proper. You make this blobka in three parts. 

First the dough.

In a small saucepan warm 1/3 cup of milk and add 1/8 cup of butter until it melts. In a medium mixing bowl put 2 cups of flour, 1 teaspoon of yeast, 1/8 cup of sugar, 1/8 cup of water, 1/8 teaspoon of salt, and 1 egg. 

Add the saucepan of milk and butter to the stuff in the bowl.

Because you don't have a stand mixer with a dough hook you mix everything with a wooden spoon and then work the dough by hand until its nice and smooth. Throw a warm damp towel over the bowl and place the bowl in a warm dark place for an hour to an hour-and-a-half.


Next the chocolate filling.

Chop 2.5 ounces of chocolate. More if you like. You can never have too much chocolate in your blobka. This is ancient Jewish wisdom, not to be refuted. God Himself told this to Moses from the burning bush. 

Throw the chopped chocolate into a bowl and add 2 teaspoons of cinnamon and 1/6 cup of sugar. 

Then cut into the bowl 1/8 cup of chilled butter. 

This is when you come face-to-face with your lack of a pastry blender. So you use the pastry blender with which the Good Lord equipped you: your ten fingers. 

Pressed the chocolate-sugar-butter-cinammon into a kind of paste. 

Last, you make the streusel topping.

For this you use 1/8 cup powdered sugar, 1/8 cup flour, and 1/8 cup chilled butter. Once again, sans pastry blender, you use your fingers to crumble up this mixture into, well, crumbles. 

Now get your dough out. If you've done it wrong, it won't have risen at all. Like I said, it will almost looks as if it's shrunk. Give this shrunken, tough lump of dough a going over. Form it into a ball, cover it with a cloth, and let it not rise—ha ha—for another ten minutes.

Ten minutes later, unwrap your ball of dough. Holy shit! It looks like its even smaller than it was before! How is that possible? Dammit, you'd better get your chocolate blobka in the oven before it disappears altogether!

Roll out the dough into a roughly rectangular shape. Then spread the chocolate mixture over it. Bring up the edges of the dough and tuck the ends in, basically to form a log of dough stuffed with chocolate. Twist it like you were twisting a towel, fold it in half, and then twist it again. Try not to break the dough, but you probably will anyway. Patch it up. 

Now put the twisted dough log into a greased bread loaf pan. Sprinkle the log with the streusel topping. 

You've already preheated the oven to 350 degrees. I haven't mentioned this, but I should have, especially if you were all obsessive and stuff about doing this the right way.

Well, better late than never. Put the loaf pan into the oven at 350 and bake it for 25-30 minutes, until it's golden brown.

I'm telling you, even if you fucked this up as badly as I've described it here, it still tastes pretty good, so good, in fact, you'd be hard-pressed not to eat the whole damn thing in one sitting! No kidding! You'll be thanking God and/or me that you didn't actually do this the way it should have been done or you'd have really made a first-class hog of yourself.

Blobka II: an Update!!!

This time I proofed the yeast in warm water first and then added it to the dry ingredients. More importantly, I added cocoa powder to the strudel topping and used more more chilled butter and chocolate in the filling. Holy moly! This one was absolutely scrumptious. It might be the best thing I ever made. It's great to think I can make something this delicious whenever I want. It's like when you discover masturbation & realize you don't need anyone or anything to make yourself feel so incredibly good.