With Easter coming up right around the corner I thought it would be the perfect time to share one of my favorite recipes using our cocoa powder. This Chocolate Pecan Babka recipe is great as both a dessert and a sweet treat with your morning coffee. Babka is one of the many foods I fell in love with while living in Brooklyn during culinary school. For my version I combine two of my Jewish Deli favorites and top the Babka with a crumb cake topping.
Some Babka’s can be overly sweet and heavy for this recipe I balance the sweetness by adding some salt at each step much like you do when cooking a savory dish. You can easily do all of the prep the night before, have the dough rise over night and wake everyone up with the delicious smell of chocolate and bread first thing the next morning. Trust me, this chocolate pecan babka will beat any cinnamon roll.
A finished Babka loaf certainly looks impressive and difficult to make and shape, but it is actually quite easy. You start off with a cinnamon roll like bread dough rolled out into a rectangle. Schmear it with a mixture of cinnamon, sugar, butter and cocoa, and then sprinkle chopped chocolate and pecans over it to add a little more indulgence. Then you simply roll it up like a cinnamon roll, cut the log in half the long way and then twist it together. You will be so proud of what a beautiful loaf you made when you see how wonderful it looks as it bakes.
More recipes from the Match Maker.
Take everything you love about a cinnamon roll, add chocolate and pecans, and top it with a crumb topping and you have this beautiful show stopping breakfast bread. With the ability to do the prep ahead of time you can have this babka hot and ready in the morning.
- 130 g lukewarm water
- 1 large egg
- 375 g all-purpose flour
- 16 g dry milk powder
- 1 tablespoon instant yeast
- 1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
- 50 g white granulated sugar
- 1 teaspoon salt
- 70 g salted butter at room temperature
- 75 g dark brown sugar
- 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
- 25 g Match cocoa powder, or another high fat variety sifted
- 45 g melted butter
- 50 g finely chopped dark chocolate 1 Match single origin bar
- 50 g diced pecans toasted if desired
- 1 pinch salt
- 1 large egg beaten with a pinch of salt until well-combined
- 45 g melted butter
- 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
- 40 g confectioners’ sugar
- 45 g King Arthur Unbleached All-Purpose Flour
- 1 pinch salt
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Combine all of the dough ingredients, mixing until everything is moistened. Cover the bowl, and let the dough rest for 20 minutes (this will shorten your kneading time). Then mix/knead it until it’s soft and smooth in a stand mixer or by hand.
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Place the dough in a lightly greased, covered bowl and let rise for about 1 hour and then move it to the fridge for 2 hours or up to overnight. It will continue to slowly rise in the fridge and the butter will firm up making it easier to roll out. It should about double in size.
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To make the filling: Melt the butter and mix in the sugar, cinnamon, cocoa, and salt. The mixture will be grainy and thick.
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Prepare a large bread pan for baking by buttering the pan and lining it with a piece of parchment. You want the parchment to over hang on the long sides of the pan and to help you lift the bread out once it’s done.
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Shape the dough into a 9″ x 18″, 1/4″-thick rectangle. Don’t worry about the exact dimensions too much, but you do want your short end to be the length of the bread pan you plan to use.
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Schmear the dough rectangle evenly with your filling leaving a one inch gap on both of the short ends of your rectangle to help you seal it.
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Scatter the nuts and chopped chocolate over the dough and lightly press them in with your hands.
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Starting with a short end, roll tightly into a log, sealing the seam and ends. Use a sharp bread knife to cut the log in half lengthwise (not crosswise) to make two pieces of dough about 10″ long each; cut carefully, to prevent too much filling from spilling out. With the exposed filling side up, twist the two pieces into a braid, tucking the ends underneath the loaf, into the prepared bread pan.
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Brush the loaf with the egg glaze. Mix together the topping ingredients until crumbly, and sprinkle over the top
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Tent with plastic wrap, and let the loaf rise until it is very puffy and has crowned a good inch over the rim of the pan, 1 1/2 to 2 1/2 hours. Towards the end of the rising time, preheat your oven to 325. Alternatively you can let the Babka rise over night in the fridge and bake in the morning. Just pull the loaf out while you are preheating the oven.
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Bake the bread for 35 minutes. Tent lightly with foil at this point if the crumb is getting too dark and bake for an additional 15 to 25 minutes (for a total of 50 to 60 minutes); the babka should be a deep-golden brown. The best way to tell when it is done is to stick an instant read thermometer in the middle, it should read 190.
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Remove from the oven, and immediately loosen the edges with a heatproof spatula. Let the babka cool for 10 minutes, then lift out of the pan with the excess parchment and place onto a rack to cool completely.
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Fight off your family while you let the babka cool so that it is easier to slice, then eventually give in and enjoy a gooey broken piece of this delicious bread.