Double chocolate babka

Not the best photo I’m afraid, but you get the idea. It’s chocolatey. Doubly chocolatey.

For those who’ve never heard of babka before, it’s a rich, sweet bread, or yeasted cake. The Wikipedia entry says the name derives from baba, which my Glutton’s Glossary talks about. It says the origins of the cake “may be Polish” but “have been richly embroidered”. One cute but probably apocryphal suggestion is that King Stanislas Leczkinski invented it, and as a fan of the Thousand and One Nights, named it after Ali Baba!

Anyway, this one is a Dan Lepard recipe, to be found here on his website or here in the Guardian.

I used to make a babka years ago in New Zealand, I’ll have to give that one a try again one of these day as I didn’t get Dan L’s one quite right, plus the one I used to make had nuts and ground choc in it, which I think I prefer. Dan L’s uses melted choc and ground crackers, which I don’t think made for quite as nice as crunch in the swirly filling. Still, very yummy.

I think we need to play around with babkas more as there are lot of different variations on the theme and several different recipes present themselves with a quick Google.