How To Make The BEST Chocolate Babka!

In a bowl, add your plain flour and then we're going to add sugar, then add your instant yeast and mix everything together until it's combined completely. Then I'm going to add my eggs and water. You can also replace water with milk if you wanted to. And we're going to whisk this on a medium speed for a few minutes. you want to make sure that the dough comes together and then at that point you want to add a little bit of salt and then I've cubed my soft butter and I'm just adding it a little bit at a time so I'm gonna get this running and I'll keep adding butter in little cubes while it's moving on medium speed and that's what you want to do and this will probably take a couple of minutes or so then you want to leave the dough mixing for about eight to ten minutes until it sort of becomes nice and elastic and super moist. Now and again you want to scrape down the bowl by using your spatula to make sure it's all evenly incorporated and it's evenly done. In the meantime you want to take a large clean bowl and add a little bit of oil there and then using a paper towel spread it around and this will make sure that the dough can rise and not stick to the actual bowl. Once your dough is ready you can see it's really really nice and elastic and it should not stick too much to your fingers. Place your dough into your prepared oil bowl and yeah make sure you scrape everything out even little bits of the dough that's left in there. Just press it down and I'm gonna wrap this in cling film and then you can place it into the fridge overnight or minimum 12 hours. Next day you want to prepare your baking tin. Spray it with some cooking oil and add your parchment paper you want to leave little bits on the side so you can easily take it out when it's baked so just sort of push it against just like that our dough has risen you can see in the fridge so you want to take it out and i'm going to show you how super soft and elastic the dough is it's still a bit cold but look at that really really soft it should leave a thumb print when you press on there sprinkle some flour on top of your surface where you're going to roll out your dough and then sprinkle a bit more on top and around your rolling pin the dough is pretty sticky I didn't actually add enough flour onto my base so add a bit more flour especially because you're going to roll out the dough and you kind of want it a nice shape like a square so do your best roll it out both sides make sure it's even and then if it's not just use your fingers and press it into a square just like this. Then I'm adding my Nutella chocolate spread. You can either make your own or if you want to save time you can just add shop-bought Nutella or homemade Nutella or any other chocolate filling that you want. Spread it pretty evenly around all the sides and make sure you have enough there. If you want more chocolate you can add more and I've decided to add extra things like pecan nuts in there and then also adding a different mix of nuts so make sure you spread it around quite evenly because you do want to make sure you get a little bit in each bite and for extra chocolate stuff and flavor i'm adding chopped chocolate chips or you can use chocolate just cut it into small pieces just like that and then start rolling it up so using both hands from both sides evenly just roll it up and you kind of want to make sort of like a sausage like a chocolate dough sausage so just keep rolling that until you get to the end and then move your dough back onto your floured surface and because it's so long you do want to squish it a little bit from the sides and then on top to make it kind of shorter and fatter and this will make sure that it fits into our pan as well once that's done you want to cut with your sharp knife in the middle through your dough make sure it's quite even and then when you separate each side you can see the filling is really beautiful in the middle and then we're kind of doing this sort of braided platter so the dough is super easy to work with so don't worry about that it's not going to stick to anything just glue the first two bits together and then just you know roll it up and down just like this so you want to create a braid with a beautiful sort of center and yeah just roll it as many times as you possibly can and of course like you can use a thicker or smaller and larger baking tin just depends what you have in the kitchen but this one is quite big so then just pick that up and put that into your baking dish and it looks like this now we want to cling film this again and leave this to proof for at least an hour or an hour and a half depending on your kitchen so you can see this has proved for an hour actually I have a really warm spot in my house very cheeky and yeah this is ready to go you don't need to do anything else just place this into the oven and bake this for about 25 to 30 minutes at 190 degrees Celsius or 375 Fahrenheit while our cake is baking we want to make a sugar syrup so add water and sugar into your pot and then cook it on the low heat for a few minutes until it's melted we're going to drizzle that all over our chocolate babka when it's ready look at that beautiful color so take your syrup and it might seem like it's a lot of syrup but don't worry just keep sort of making your sponge moist and going over the cake as much as you can you will see the difference in color once i finished with my syrup look at that it's beautiful golden it's so delicious and it's going to make the chocolate babka very moist inside as well i decided to add extra chocolate on top feel free to dust it with icing sugar or whatever you want i wasn't very patient enough so i decided to