Polish Easter Babka

King Arthur Flour has one of the greatest baking blogs I've found. They are so thorough and have such great descriptions of their recipes. Not just that, but reading the blog is also pretty entertaining. A few days ago they posted a recipe for Polish Babka. I saw that and an Easter sweetbread with eggs and was torn which one to make. Then I remembered that I don't really have the patience for traditional yeast doughs, so I went with the babka.

I followed the recipe pretty much to a T, using some dried cranberries instead of candied fruit and grating in some orange rind as well. I also (1) don't have a bundt pan and (2) couldn't for the life of me find one at the grocery store or Marshall's, so I baked it in a loaf pan. A little less glamorous, and because the bread rose, not successful in soaking with rum syrup on the top and frosting on the bottom, so, frosting went on the top too.

It was sitting on the counter (husband wanted to eat some for breakfast but it hadn't been frosted yet) and I was going to wait until post-run to have a slice (see soaked with rum), but actually waited until we got back from Easter dinner. It's quite lovely.

Bad Blogger, No Photos

Ahhh, so I have been a bad blogger lately and didn't take photos of the cool things I did. For instance, I made pizza dough from scratch, which is pretty much the easiest thing to do, ever. In fact, I made it again last night, and minus the fact that I no longer have a pizza stone, it turned out pretty good.

SB also had a birthday, which was a bit of a failure in celebrating, as there was a bachelor party the weekend before and a  half marathon the weekend after. (Note: are there any 10 milers in Boston?) 
I did make a fancy cake though - marble with mocha frosting. We ate maybe 3 slices, then it lived in the fridge for a few weeks, until I finally tossed it out and made another cake.


 I also made cupcakes. Why? Because one recipe only made one layer of cake, but two recipes made two layers and a dozen cupcakes.

What? Yes. We went out last weekend with a crowd for his birthday, so I made the super easy yellow cake. True story, there is 8 oz of wine in the recipe, and wine is not something we keep in our house. I went for a run Saturday morning (and to pick up a race # for the next day) and walked back in the door with a bottle of wine. SB's response: what are you doing with that?

That cake was so much less fuss than the first cake. Observe: 

I won't bore you anymore, I made chocolate frosting, it didn't turn out right but it frosted better than planned, we celebrated at Red Bones, I had a few beers, then went home so I could race a 5 miler in the morning.