Since prior to Christmas I had my eye on a recipe, but knew it was a lengthy one and needed some time and patience. I decided after running on Sunday to tackle this Chocolate Babka recipe courtesy of Cakespy.com. Maybe it wasn't the smartest idea as for some reason today my back is killing me!
What is Babka you ask? It is a filled twisted bread with a streusel topping, this one specifically is filled with dark chocolate and baking cocoa. Anyways, I love making homemade bread, but the furthest I have tackled is plain egg bread and if you count banana bread and what nots. Also, I broke out my KitchenAid Artisan mixer last week for icing prep and I wanted to see how it handled bread making! I seriously don't know why I waited so long to break this baby out. My mom and Grandmother got this for me for my bridal shower, yep back in August! Thanks so much again!
She handled great! I think my only complaint was that I had to wash the bowl out so much because I wanted to use it for everything.
Too bad I didn't take any other pictures of my Babka, it was amazing!! This is the only picture I got and it was half way through eating it already! It was sooo yummy!
Today I prepped for my cake class, I didn't want to make a box cake again so I decided to bake a red velvet cake with cream cheese filling. I used the recipe from Smittenkitchen.com. I think it came out pretty darn good, except if you look at the picture it is more like red-swirl velvet cake!
I think this may have been due to the fact that I used red icing gel dissolved in water and well, it didn't exactly dissolve that nicely. I did make some substitutions in the recipe, mostly because I already have 4 kinds of flour in my pantry and I didn't want to buy cake flour. I sifted 3 cups of all-purpose flour instead and I used vegetable oil instead of the called on canola oil.
Then I had to smooth ice the cake in prep for decorating tomorrow and prepare decoration icing. This was a bit more frustrating than I imagined. In class it looked so easy and tonight it was ummm NOT! I'll cross my fingers it gets better with practice and less cursing. See for yourself...
I chose blue and yellow as we are supposed to make a clown cake, yippee!
Tune in tomorrow for the final cake and tasting!! For the rest of my cake class writings...
...the chocolate babka was some of your best work thus far! Keep it coming, that is, until my pants have trouble buttoning...
ReplyDelete