A Decadent Chocolate Babka

Some time last year, I ran across Smitten Kitchen’s post for Chocolate Babka, and I’ve had it bookmarked ever since.  Last week, before I went out of town, I had the opportunity to make it, and use up over two pounds of chocolate.

Two and a quarter pounds, to be precise.

The recipe also called for 5 sticks of butter, but I tweaked that and got away with about 3 sticks.

Here is a quick summary:  the bread is FANTASTIC.  My husband took one bite and told me it didn’t need any more butter.  But he also felt that there was “too much going on” between the chocolate filling and streusel topping, and I agree.  When you check out the recipe at Smitten Kitchen, I would recommend that you incorporate the butter slowly, bit by bit, as you would in a traditional brioche recipe, instead of dumping all the butter in at once.

My mistake:  for some reason, I missed the part of the directions that said to finely chop the chocolate.  I used chocolate chips, and totally forgot to give them a whir in the food processor. The nice part was that I have pockets of gooey chocolate . . . the problem is that the filling kept falling out.  Another note on the filling – I eliminated all the butter from it, and the bread did not suffer a bit.  I discovered this when I made Peter Reinhart’s cinnamon buns, which have no butter in the filling and I didn’t even miss it.

I’ll definitely be making this again, even without all the filling because the bread is so incredibly good.

It has been a busy morning.  Backed into a ditch at 6:00 am, and AAA just towed me out.  Now, off to take my auntie to medical appointments!

And be sure to check out Susan’s weekly YeastSpotting roundup every Friday.