i messed up my babka pretty bad and it still turned out pretty good. this is babka practice.

this is all to say - please don’t be too hard on yourself when taking on big baking or cooking projects. i worry for people who are so scared that something won’t turn out perfectly that they won’t even make an attempt at a recipe. you must learn somehow!

i cook and bake frequently, and do not consider myself an advanced cook or baker whatsoever - there is still so so so much endless learning to be learned.

[ps. i know the title of this post is grammatically incorrect, but it rings much better than writing ‘badly’ and ‘well.’ (ok, DAD?!) 😜]

i’ve made a version of babka once before - but here’s how this loaf went down:

where i went right:

the brioche dough turned out perfectly! i followed the ‘chocolate krantz cakes’ recipe in yotam ottolenghi’s jerusalem cookbook and cut the recipe in half as to make only 1 loaf. not sure why the written recipe yields 2 separate loaves. because 2 is more than 1, i suppose.
i finished the whole process even though i knew i’d messed up a few key things along the way.
it tasted good!

where i went wrong:

i did not use high-quality chocolate, like a goon. i made this on a snow day (cozy!) and did not want to venture out to buy nice chocolate bars, so i used a combination of semi-sweet chocolate chips and cocoa powder. i do not recommend this. it looks decent after melting, but once i added the powdered sugar, it became a bit thick and crumbly. you can really tell once i started twisting my goofed up braids that the chocolate quality was not up to par.
since i halved the original recipe, i was supposed to adjust this part to roll up only ONE large dough log with chocolate spread inside (like a cinnamon roll). instead, i kept following the original recipe instructions and made 2 separate logs, sliced each of them in half vertically, yielding 4 long pieces to be braided into my desired single log loaf. do you follow? i had gone too far with the final pieces to be braided and decided that i would just braid all 4 pieces somehow into one dense loaf. i’m not sophisticated enough to maneuver a 4-stranded braid, but it came together, kinda.
keyword: dense. brioche is supposed to be fluffy and a bit airy. the tightness of the 4 pieces braided together did not allow the loaf to rise again - i think it was all too tightly compacted and twisted together. the final babka loaf should have been significantly taller after baking.

here’s where you can really see that chocolate i used was not high-quality. it should be much smoother and less chONky looking.

but - i know exactly where i went wrong, what i learned from this process, and how i would approach it differently the next time i make a babka recipe.

and that, my friends, is the beauty of failure. failures are just building blocks of knowledge.

i wouldn’t even call this a “failure,” because it still tasted very good, just dense - we ate the whole thing on a snowy weekend. how glorious is that?