Weekend Baking – Babka ⋆ Gingers In The Wild

Welcome to our first edition of “Weekend Baking” on Gingers In The Wild!

Each month we will show you a breakdown of what we challenged ourselves to bake “over the weekend”. Everything might not turn out this pretty but at least it will contain sugar! This first edition is dedicated to something I have never baked before…Babka. And y’all it was way harder than I thought it would be!

The Pre-Bake Story

This beautiful book available here and here.

At the beginning of December we took a family trip to New York City to celebrate my Grandmother’s 80th Birthday. One of our favorite places to eat ended up being Russ and Daughters Cafe (we ate there twice!). If you are in NYC right now go there and eat all the things! The family owned deli located down the street from the cafe and the cafe itself are both beautiful and the food is unreal. I think we ate our weight in bagels, latkes, and black&white cookies. And because of how delicious the food was it made me want to try my hand at baking some traditional Jewish foods.

So when Shelby gave me this book for Christmas I knew it would be our first “Weekend Baking” challenge. Shannon Sarna’s cookbook Modern Jewish Baker is stunning, from the up close images of sprinkles, flour, and butter. To the modern twist on traditional baked goods like babka, challah, and bagels. I instantly feel in love and wanted to make everything!

After scanning all of the recipes I decided to try the Birthday Cake Babka, because well I am a sucker for sprinkles. Shannon’s recipe can be found online here. Below is my step-by-step try at making her babka for the first time. Enjoy!

Start: Collecting Ingredients

All ingredients purchased at Sprouts Farmers Market, my current favorite place.

Basics: Making the Dough

Combing all the dry ingredients. (mixer, measuring cups)

Adding in the milk, eggs, melted butter, and yeast.

Dividing up the dough after it has risen. The recipe yields one loaf of babka.

The Fun Part: Sprinkles and Sugar!

Spreading out the delicious cream cheese, powered sugar, sprinkle filling.

Making sure all surfaces were covered before rolling the dough.

This was my favorite part, you divide the rolled sections and then twist away. This creates the finished swirl pattern on the final product.

Proof: The Final Product!

Thoughts:

Truth, this ended up taking more time than I originally thought. So when you try it make sure to block out a morning to afternoon. I think for our first try at a traditional bake it worked out really well. It was super yummy and a great option for breakfast with family. I could see myself making this again and honestly can’t wait to try some of the other versions in the cookbook.

Thanks for reading and happy baking!

-K and S