Now that I have confidence in working with yeast, I’m interested in more complex recipes. This chocolate babka is definitely a work in progress. I riffed off a couple of recipes I found online. I have to say this is not the method I’ll be filing away as the best version of the recipe. But that’s part of the process of developing a recipe that suits your personal tastes. I like sweets but I’m not a fan of overly sweet food. I want a balanced treat, to taste all the elements, not just sugar. Desserts with multiple steps have multiple points at which sugar is incorporated. Meaning there are multiple points at which I compare the different amounts of sugar being added.
Rules of Recipe Development
I broke two of my own rules making this. One, I did not halve the recipe. This was a major mistake. Now, I have two loaves of mediocre chocolate babka. This means I won’t be returning to fiddle with proportions any time soon.
The second rule is never to omit sugar from a step entirely. Of course, you can put more in the beginning and less at the end. That is not what happened here. I did away with the final step of syrup completely. This was a mistake. The interior texture and flavor of the babka taste similar to a chocolate croissant. Unfortunately, the crispy crust lacks flavor. It tastes like eating two different kinds of bread at once. One delicious and decadent, the other better reserved for breadcrumbs.
Process of Recipe Development
There is little point in writing out a recipe I won’t be following again. Instead, I’ll share my process of choosing elements from different recipes and disclose what I did differently.
For the Dough and Chocolate Streusel
Melissa Clark has a highly rated Chocolate Babka. I decided to follow her method for the dough and streusel and to forgo her fudge filling.
The ingredients for her fudge filling seemed a little too high in fat and sugar coupled with what was already going into the dough and streusel. As for the dough and streusel, I did everything the same as the recipe.
For the Fudge Filling
The better chocolate babka from Smitten Kitchen had a well proportioned fudge filling. Here I did an adaptation that was not preplanned. The recipe calls for 130 grams of dark chocolate. I happened to have two bars totaling 200 grams and thought why not use it all and just ratio the rest of the ingredients. I should have stuck with the lesser amounts. It’s not that there is too large a volume of fudge occupying the interior of babka. The larger ratio lends to a more decadent babka. I essentially undid my attempt to keep the fat and sugar contents lower than that of the Melissa Clark recipe.
Missing the Mark
There was an option for nuts in the Smitten Kitchen version. I think the crunch and nuttiness would have been a nice balance to all the chocolate. The biggest miss – ahem fail – was not making a simple syrup and pouring it over immediately after taking the loaves out of the oven.
Notes for Next Time
Since I made two loaves, I wrapped one up and put it in the freezer. When I do eventually attempt chocolate babka again I’ll be sure to go through my notes on what I liked and what went wrong this first time.
