quinn's place

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?

plus, i didn’t wanna throw out all these photos i took!

…a real missed opportunity not taking a photo of my babka out in the snow….. add that to the list of where i went wrong. 😉

i’m not afraid of you, little babka recipe! i’m gunna get you real goooood one day.

it allllllll started when this piece o' bread convinced me it was a donut.

this rustic campagnolo bread (the brown one below) seriously takes on donut-like properties when toasted and buttered. the key here is butter. it was the wildest thing. i honestly felt like i was eating a donut, on two separate occasions.

i put these cherry preserves (thanks greg & rebecca!) on this buttered slice of

grand central bakery's campagnolo

toast, aaaaaand it was so mega delicious and mysteriously donut-like. later... i made a regular ol grilled cheese sandwich with the same bread...and it tasted like a donut, too! like whaaaaaa!?

i began researching this magical bread straight away. all i know is that its made with honey and yellow polenta, so maybe thats where it gets its sweeter characteristics.

howeverrrrr, when not buttered, the campagnolo bread does not take on donut-like properties. its very earthy and more like a rye when plain...

rye bread and donuts do not go hand in hand for me...

its all so puzzling.

sooo, then i went on a toast making spree!

here's how it all went down.

grand central baking company campagnolo

on the left, a plump baby loaf of pugliese on the right.

the pugliese is most delightful and seems like a middle of the road bread, somewhere between the likes of sourdough and white as far as texture and flavor.

sometime a few years ago, i was seriously pondering how badly i just wanted there to be a place where i could get a good piece o toast in the morning with a fun topping......

fast forward to 2015, and its alllllllllll about the damn toasts with fun toppings.

uggghhh, why didn't i execute?!?

nobody wants to shut up about avocado toasts or ricotta toasts right now. i'm personally very into these types of toast because they are scrumptious. so i won't shut up about it either!