I have had a torn out recipe from Cooking Light for years: chocolate babka.
Even though I cook all the time, there are still recipes every now and then that are completely intimidating. This was one of them.
One that I simply decided to get over. Last week when I made my simple white bread, I remembered how fun and easy bread-making can be (though time-consuming.) So I resolved to tackle this babka recipe!
Of course, I’ve gone vegan since tearing out that page several years ago, so now I needed to veganize it too.
Here’s how I did it!
Start with this Cooking Light recipe.
Veganize:
milk –> light vanilla soy milk (I’ll bet almond milk would work well too!)
egg yolk –> 1 t Ener-G egg replacer mixed with 2 t water
butter –> Earth Balance margarine
chocolate –> make sure you use vegan dark chocolate!
Other changes: I used all-purpose flour for the whole recipe – turns out bread flour is not necessary 🙂
Review: SO. GOOD. The texture of this bread is amazing. It’s soft and pulls apart well. The chocolate filling is like the filling of a chocolate croissant. It gets nice and crusty on the outside, but so so fluffy. Love it. It was also pretty darn easy, despite my being intimidated!
Next time:
>> grind the sugar! I used raw sugar for the filling, and it didn’t melt into the filling. It’s nothing that would stop me from devouring this bread, but next time I’ll grind it up so it’s finer.
>> no streusel. The streusel didn’t add much for me, so it’s just not worth the added fat and calories in such an unhealthy mixture. Leave it out altogether!
>> whole wheat? This is pretty hearty, I will try subbing half the flour for whole wheat to add a bit of nutrition to this decadent bread.
Nutrition facts per serving (1/10th of loaf, minus the streusel because I’m just picking it off and you should too!): Calories: 315; Calories from Fat: 88; Total Fat: 9.8g; Saturated Fat: 3.7g; Trans Fat: 0.0g; Sodium: 179mg; Total Carbohydrates: 53.5g; Dietary Fiber: 2.5g; Sugars: 25.0g; Protein: 5.2g
Leave a Reply