"Baking With Julia" by Julia Child (2004)

[SethG]

I think the only Easter-themed recipe in the book happens to be... the babas, actually. I believe these are a Polish Easter tradition. By the way, Ling, babas are little celebration cakes, enriched with butter and egg and dark rum. The version in BWJ also includes an injection of pastry cream, but I don't think that's traditional.

I happened to be looking at the King Arthur (eGullet credit link) book that came out last year, and it includes a few Easter breads as well:

Poticza, a Slovakian bread featuring alternating layers of dough and sugar/nut filling. It looks fun to make-- the nuts get placed onto sheets of dough, which are then rolled up and combined into a loaf.

There's also a recipe for Italian Easter pie, which features two layers of sweetened pizza dough sandwiching a savory filling of eggs, ham, ricotta, Parmesan, and parsley. Its flavor profile seems almost identical to the Pizza Rustica some of us here made a few weeks ago.

Peter Reinhart also has a recipe in The Bread Baker's Apprentice (eGullet credit link) for a Greek Easter bread called Lambropsomo, which includes some spices (cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, cloves) and dried fruits/nuts (raisins, apricots, almonds). The loaf is braided like a challah and includes three hard-cooked eggs, dyed red, to be nestled into the braids!

I'm not necessarily proposing these breads for the group-- I just thought they were all interesting and festive. If a lot of folks wanted to do one of them I could PM some recipes around.

I also like all three of Kirsten's suggestions.

[rickster]

I think the only Easter-themed recipe in the book happens to be... the babas, actually. I believe these are a Polish Easter tradition.

I think babkas are the Polish Easter tradition. Totally different thing.

[foodie3]

from epicurious food dictionary:

baba

[bAH-bah]

Also called baba au rhum , this rich, light currant- or raisin-studded yeast cake is soaked in a rum or KIRSCH syrup. It's said to have been invented in the 1600s by Polish King Lesczyinski, who soaked his stale KUGELHOPF in rum and named the dessert after the storybook hero Ali Baba. The classic baba is baked in a tall, cylindrical mold but the cake can be made in a variety of shapes, including small individual rounds. When the cake is baked in a large ring mold it's known as a SAVARIN.

[SethG]

I'm not a Christian, a Pole, or an expert on Christians or Poles. I know the babka as a different (and tasty!) coffee cake, often in my experience also containing chocolate-- the confusion (if any) resulted from the fact that the word babka is derived from the Polish "baba," which in addition to referring to Ali Baba also means grandmother or old woman. If you look for baba or babka recipes on the web you'll find both words used to describe babkas. When I said I thought baba was an Easter bread I was recalling some Google results I had in which Easter and baba were connected-- some of these were rum cake babas, though. Maybe babas and babkas are cousins, derived from the same tradition?

Or maybe I was just wrong.

Edited April 5, 2004 by SethG (log)

[rickster]

I always thought the rum babas/savarin were a French patisserie invention maybe inspired by something Polish/Eastern European. That would seem to be wrong based on what Epicurious says. The Polish Easter bread though is what most people call babka although we never had it filled with chocolate.

[Larry]

Ukrainian/Polish babka's are usually made with raisins and fairly sweet, sometimes with a light glaze over top. It's usually Italian Pannettones that are more coffee cake like and filled with chocolate. We also make pascha/paska, another Easter bread that is less sweet than the babka but sweeter than a kolach/challah type of bread, or course always in the round shape.

[Ling]

My Baking With Julia came in the mail today.

[SethG]

Okay, last week I spun the group into total inaction by repeatedly seeking consensus among a variety of choices. This week, I will follow the principle I usually use in suggesting what we do: we should do whatever was first proposed.

Therefore: we should make ka'kat. Looks fun and different.

Who's in?

[devlin]

Golly, the do what? Seriously, you really should stop being so darned nice. Just tell us what to do!

I don't recall the ka'kat, but I'll try to take a look at it later. And although I want very much to say "I'm in!" my inlaws are arriving on my doorstep sometime tomorrow evening or Friday as part of their annual Spring migration from Florida back north, so I can't make any firm commitments except to getting ready for them. Still, I'm gonna check back. Maybe we could turn it into a family thing. They'd love it, come to think of it.

[mdt]

For those of us that are away from our beloved copies of BWJ, what is a ka'kat?

[Ling]

From Baking with Julia:

"Throughout the Eastern Mediterranean, ka'kat are a staple--and satisfying--street food, seemingly available everywhere and anytime. Sesame-seed encrusted and sized for snacking, they're about two and a half inches across and reminiscent, if not in taste, then certainly in mood, of soft American pretzels. This bread is often flavored with mahleb, the ground kernels of a type of black cherry found in the region. Mahleb is available in Middle Eastern groceries, and a quarter teaspoon mixed into the dough will add an exotic aroma to the baked breads."

[Ling]

And yes, I'm in for the ka'kat. This will be my first time baking bread with yeast. I've only done it in a bread machine before.

[brngckn]

I'm in. Thanks for selecting one of my suggestions.

[Rhea_S]

Busy preparing for Easter, but I'll see what I can do. I can even buy mahleb at a local supermarket!

[devlin]

What the heck is mahleb? If I can't find it, is there a substitute? I live in the middle of nowhere with access only to Wal Mart groceries unless I want to travel a bit.

[alacarte]

maybe you can mail-order some from Kalustyan'sor another Indian or Middle Eastern food web site.

(edited to add link)

Edited April 8, 2004 by alacarte (log)

[Dahomechef]

Dahome here--been away for a few days and consequently no baking--missed last weekend, which doesn't look like a big loss. I still plan to make the Babas at some point. They just look too yummy to miss.

But..... I'm in for the ka'kat this weekend. Wouldn't have picked this recipe myself, which is exactly why I'm enjoying this project so much!

Mahleb is apparently a flavoring made from ground black cherry pits, according to the Food Lover's Companion. Haven't seen it at Safeway, but the recipe calls for 1/4 teaspoon and lists it as optional. Maybe another flavoring could be used?

[Dahomechef]

From the Purespice.com site:

"In Turkey and the Middle East, the small, beige-colored oval kernels of the black cherry tree are dried and ground to flavor breads and pastries. They are soft, have a nutty chewiness and a bitter, rather sour, taste when sampled on their own. It is best to buy mahlab whole, and grind as needed."

a 2.2 oz jar is $16.60!

From Penzeys.com:

"Mahlab, the pit of the sour cherry, has been used for centuries in the Middle East (especially in Turkey and Syria) as a sweet/sour, nutty addition to breads, cookies and biscuits. This old spice has gained an American following with the new interest in Mediterranean cooking and is mentioned in several popular new cookbooks."

a 2.2 oz jar is $3.09. go figure

From this info, can anyone suggest an alternative so I can bake this weekend? Curious minds want to know....

[mdt]

I am in for making them this weekend. If I cannot find mahlab at the store I am going to skip it as it is optional.

Too bad we did not pick this recipe earlier as put in an order to Penzeys before I knew about this.

Mike

[SethG]

That's the spirit, people!

I just secured a source for mahleb myself. This will only make sense to New Yorkers, but I'm not the only one here, right? I was sure Sahadi's Importing Co. in Brooklyn would carry it, but they don't. But then I spoke to the nice woman at D'Vine Taste on Seventh Avenue in Park Slope and she said she'd get me some for tomorrow, and keep the rest for herself!

By the way, I believe ka'kat is a Polish Easter tradition, but I could be wrong about that.

[Dahomechef]

Still having trouble locating the elusive mahleb, and I really want to make the ka'kat with this flavor, so I'm going to wait until I have it to bake.

Needing a baking fix this weekend, I made the BWJ Babas:

Without baba molds or brioche pans, I used a popover pan which gave a really nice shape. The recipe yielded 5-and-a-runt babas, and the pastry cream was about twice what was needed. The recipe was fun to make and the babas baked up with a lovely open moist crumb. The more rum drizzled over these babies, the better they taste.

About 20 years ago this was my favorite dessert. The recipe produced about the same taste and a much lighter crumb than the babas I remember, but I guess my tastes have changed: they really are too sweet and gooey for me now.

What's on for next week?

[SethG]

Those babas look great, Dahome.

Here's my ka'kat:

These are super easy and they taste like nice little slightly sweet dinner rolls. I keep going back and forth on whether I can taste any mahleb or not.

[brngckn]

Boy, these Ka'kat were easy to make, weren't they? I'm not sure if I taste the mahleb either, but they do taste good - I just ate three of them!

[Dahomechef]

Mmmm ... those ka'kat look good, SethG and brngckn. Maybe I'll try them with some ground fennel seed instead of the mahleb, what do you think?

[kitwilliams]

did y'all see that this thread just hit 10,000 views? impressive! and now that I'm back in town, perhaps I'll be able to join in on all the fun.

So what's planned for this week?