It’s not quite fall yet, but it’s getting closer. Rosh Hashanah is imminent, Eid is just days away. It seemed like time for a babka.
Babka is not quite cake and not quite bread. I make my babka with my standard challah dough. For each loaf I start a teaspoon and a half of dry yeast in a mixture of 1 cup of warm milk (or unflavored, unsweetened soy or almond milk), 6 Tablespoons of melted butter or (non-olive) oil, and 3 Tablespoons of honey. Give it 10 minutes or so to come to life, then add two beaten eggs and mix well. Mix in all-purpose unbleached flour until you have a smooth, elastic, but still fairly wet dough: it should stick to your hands a bit, and to the bowl. Knead it for about 20 minutes, then form into a ball and put in a covered bowl to double, which will take an hour or two depending on how warm your room is.
When the dough is doubled, punch it down and let it rest for ten minutes or so while you do two things:
- heavily grease and flour your pan, either a large loaf pan or a medium-sized souffle dish, which is what I used for this babka (and when I say “heavily” I do mean heavily, if you think you’re overdoing it you’re just about right)
- and prepare, for each loaf, a double ration of King Arthur Flour’s Baker’s Cinnamon Filling (1/2 cup filling mix, 2 T water).
I do not often recommend prepared ingredients, as regular readers of this blog will know, but KAF’s baker’s helpers are of very high quality and they do exactly what they promise. In this case, you end up with a cinnamon filling that stays put a lot better than any I have ever made on my own from recipes, I suspect due to the combination of superfine sugar and dried shortening in very very tiny particles. It gives a good flavor, a good texture, and it doesn’t all ooze out all over the place, as you can see from the closeup above.
On a heavily floured surface, roll out the dough into a rectangle about two feet long and perhaps 10 inches wide. Spread thinly with the cinnamon mixture and roll it up the long way, so you end up with a two-foot-long rope. Slice it into rounds about 1 1/2 inches-2 1/2 inches wide with a sharp knife.
At this point you could choose to fit the rounds into a rectangular baking pan on their sides, and bake them as cinnamon rolls, or you can proceed with the babka, which means packing them in several layers into your prepared pan, with the rolls oriented in multiple directions so the spirals of cinnamon go in different directions through the completed loaf. Leave a fair bit of space between individual chunks of dough so they can rise and moosh into one another. Half as much space between chunks as the dough chunk is wide seems to be about right. Make at least two layers of dough chunks in the pan.
Cover loosely and let rise until doubled. Once doubled, preheat the oven to 350F, and when the oven is at heat, brush the top of the babka with an egg wash (egg scrambled with a tablespoon of cold water) and, if desired, sprinkle with either your favorite streusel or, as I did here, with pearl sugar.
Bake until thoroughly golden brown on top and done throughout, about 45 minutes to 1 hour, depending on how many layers are in your loaf. Let cool in the pan for 15 minutes, then turn out and finish cooling on a wire rack.
Serve as a coffee cake, for breakfast, for dessert, or just eat several healthy slabs of it with a couple of glasses of milk like my Belovedary just did and call it supper.
