Take Three: Babka, Chocolate Hazelnut

What's better than chocolate and hazelnuts and butter? I'll tell ya. When it's baked into a babka, a Polish / Ukrainian cake bread, that is! Is it Jewish, you may ask? Why, yes. Yes, it is. I've pictorially recorded the process that happened a few days ago. Once again, I used King Arthur (AP) Flour for the dough. Since I ended up with two babka, I split the free form babka creation in two and surprised the neighbors. Let's just say it went over.

Picture 1 (top left) and 2 (top right) are of the dough on Day 1. Picture 3 (->) is after I let the dough rest and ferment overnight in the fridge. The dough rose more than I expected.

The chocolate mixture in Pictures 4 and 5 include semi-sweet chips and chopped hazelnuts, with extra butter. I toasted the hazelnuts before chopping them.

The texture of the chocolate swirl was perfect; the temper on the chocolate left the consistency soft and pliable, and not at all chalky.

The Krantz Cake method was used for the design/construction for the dough placed in the loaf pan. I made a second babka, and placed it on a parchment on a half sheet pan. In the final picture, you can see the babka with the simple vanilla sugar glaze. I didn't want to overdue it with the glaze, as the glaze should complement the babka, not steal the thunder.

Talk about stealing the thunder, baking has gotten me to think about my life, more so than before. I think I've been saying I'm having a quarter life crisis for the last five years and I've found some content in the kitchen. To be frank, I had the hardest time cutting into this babka, although I've been perfectly able to eat it. The glazed babka looked beautiful, what I imagined to be right out of a magazine, but I also found myself filled with a sort of happiness and fulfillment, bordering on gratitude for having created something so delectable and so purposeful, which I haven't felt since I was in university. Is this a simplified version of feeling as one does giving life to human spawn? I suppose it's a flicker of that, but I have not had this feeling in any sort of job I've held. Maybe I do not feel as though I am creating anything worth while in the corporate environment. I think I'm struggling to find direction at work, and I just get baking. I suppose I am more creative than I would like to admit. That baking is both creating something lovely and inherently impermanent yet functional, is quite meaningful and fulfilling for me and delightful for those who partake in my edible creations.

In an effort to expand my baking horizons, I ended up a book store today and managed, magically, to score two fantastic books: Peter Reinhart's The Bread Baker's Apprentice and Uri Scheft's Breaking Breads. I then ran over to the grocer to pick up some cake flour for a Streusel Cheese Babka in Scheft's book. Gotta go make the dough tonight! But let me return to  my previous statement. I was wondering, "what exactly is cake flour?" And do I really need it? I understand the protein concentrations vary, which I guess means the different flours do function differently. Protein content is another  topic for another post for another time.