Chocolate Cinnamon Babka

The Chocolate Cinnamon Babka was a fun bread. I made the recipe exactly as written and the result was as good as it looks! I doubled the recipe so that I could have a loaf for us and a loaf to gift. If I would have realized how large a loaf this recipe makes, I would have made one batch and divided it in half. The dough is rich with lots of milk, butter and egg yolks - perfect for the holidays!

I used the Israeli Kranz cake shaping technique. I've used this method for other spiraled breads and am always pleased by how easy it is to make a stunning bread.

The result was a bread that looked good enough to eat! And the flavor didn't disappoint! Yummy!

It took me three times to make this before I felt like I got it almost right. It is really easy to over-bake so this time I baked it for the minimum time suggested- and then maybe a few minutes less would have been good. I baked it in a bundt pan and the bottom (when you invert it) got really dark so I had to put aluminum foil on it. If I hadn't noticed this 15 minutes in, the whole thing would have been ruined.

I haven't been able to get the streusel topping right. The first time I made this I used a loaf pan but the dough rose so much that there was little room for the topping. The second time I made this I used a bundt pan. However, that meant that the topping was placed on the dough after the rise and the topping ended up on the bottom of the cake. This time I put the streusel in the bundt pan first, added the dough and baked it. It tasted really good but you couldn't see the topping- it baked into a hard covering on the top of the cake.

This babka tasted really good and I finally got the swirl right. I am not sure why mine hadn't twisted properly the other times. I thought this one looked great and tasted good too! Finally.

I made this recipe standard version without the topping. I thought it might be sweet enough (and fattening) without the optional topping.

The Babka was really good. It is sweet, but not too sweet and the bread is very soft and slightly sweet, much like Panettone. I loved the combination of dark chocolate and cinnamon for the filling too. There was a good balance between the sweet bread and the bitterness from the dark chocolate chips.

I had one problem with the recipe. The recipe calls for 1 teaspoon or 7 grams of cinnamon. I always like to weigh my ingredients, so I added 1 teaspoon and it weighed only 1.1 grams. I wasn't sure whether I should use 7 grams or 1 teaspoon. I decided to use only 1 teaspoon rather than potentially using 7 times to much cinnamon. It turned out that I didn't really taste the cinnamon in the filling, so perhaps next time I will use a bit more.

Overall a very good recipe and would make this again. My feeling that the topping was not needed was confirmed when tasting it.

Check out the pictures I posted.