Apple and Chocolate Heaven cake with honey and cinnamon syrup

Apple cake for Rosh Hashana – been there, done that. Here’s a new combo that includes the seasonal and traditionally significant tastiness of the ever-so-overdone Rosh dessert. Thank you smitten kitchen, al di la restaurant, and my CIA spy (aka my brother) for your inspirations…

The Rugelach Rebuttal

Delicious little chocolate filled cookies

In a much belated response to Gordon’s rugelach post a little while ago, I made it my mission to find a good Israeli recipe for rugalach. So after much internet research I finally found a great recipe in one of my cousin’s older cookbooks.

You can really put in any filling you like, varying from nuts to fruit flavorings, whatever your suits your fancy. I decided to go with chocolate knowing all my very willing taste testers would all be happy with that. I experimented with a number of different chocolate variations, first starting with a chocolate syrup, chocolate chips, and then a chocolate spread. All where tasty but I personally felt the spread was the most delicious, so I give that in the recipe below.

Chocolate Pecan Babka

What you can't see is almost a stick of butter

Babke, is Polish for grandmother. Which is odd because these tasty yeast cakes bear no resemblance to little old peasant women. Rather, it resembles brioche, the bread with the butter baked in and a dough so rich you cannot really make it by hand. Babka are part of the shared culinary legacy of both Jewish and Catholic communities in Eastern Europe. Among the Poles, a babka was prepared for Easter using fruit or rum. The Jewish version however leans towards chocolate. This preference is immortalized by Elaine in Seinfeld season 5 with the line “(the cinnamon babka is) a lesser babka” (this is after they see the last chocolate one get snapped up).

While all of this is terribly interesting, it does not explain why I had to ransack several Jewish and non-Jewish cookbooks to find a recipe for this dessert. One thing I can tell you is that in many cookbooks the first entry in the B’s is bacon (including the ’31 edition of the Settlement Cookbook, written mostly by Jewish housewives). After a fair bit of digging I was able to find a few recipes to work from. The one that provided the most help oddly was the new Gourmet Today published just on the eve of that fabled magazine’s demise.

Recipe after the jump