I wanted to try the kranz coffeecake concept again after making a whole wheat cinnamon raisin one.
This time, I made half a batch of Janna Gur’s recipe (from The Book of New Israeli Food by the editor of Israel’s leading food magazine Al HaShulchan–see here for another interview) to make one loaf of chocolate halvah kranz coffeecake.
I also used half a batch of whole wheat challah dough to make the orange date kranz coffeecake version suggested by Baroness Tapuzina.
I was fascinated by Stefanie’s idea of using a water roux to make dough lighter and fluffier. I wondered what it would do to my whole wheat challah dough.
Lithuanian Babka
Disclaimer: The title of this post is kind of a joke. As far as I know, there is no Litvish/Galitzianer babka dichotomy. I only gave this post its title because Maggie Glezer calls her babka Lithuanian Babka and I used an alternate filling for half of the dough to make a different kind of babka. The recipe for that alternate filling came from my grandmother (Z”L), and that side of my family is Galitzianer. But, my grandmother had used the filling in what she and her friends just called coffeecake, not Galitzianer Babka.
It all started with me wanting to make a yeast bread with cardamom, chocolate, and coffee flavors. The obvious approach was babka with cardamom in the dough and a chocolate-coffee filling.
Maggie Glezer has an interesting recipe for Lithuanian Babka in A Blessing of Bread that always appealed to me. The recipe comes from her husband’s grandmother. What is interesting about this babka is that it is formed into an elaborate round twist instead of the usual loaf shape.
Glezer’s recipe makes two babka loaves (total flour 26.5 ounces, or 13.25 ounce flour per loaf). I more or less followed Glezer’s filling recipe for one babka and experimented with my (Galitzianer) grandmother’s yeast coffee cake filling for the other.
Lithuanian Filling
Babka With the Meringue Filling
Pragmatic Attic 