Currently cooking out of Pure Dessert by Alice Medrich.

This is actually two recipes in one. First, you make a batch of Desire’s Brioche dough. But instead of making traditional brioche loaves, you roll the dough out and spread a filling of muscovado sugar and cinnamon on it, then roll the dough up and cut it like cinnamon rolls. Then you toss the sliced dough into the pan and bake it. What you end up with is sort of a cross between monkeybread and cinnamon-swirl bread.

The main feature of brioche is that is contains a lot of butter, and you have to slowly beat chilled butter into the dough. I haven’t made brioche before, but Medrich’s instructions were pretty clear. She warns that this dough is very wet, sticky and elastic. She wasn’t kidding.

My dough seemed too wet and almost mushy. Even though I beat it for the amount of time Medrich said to, it didn’t pull together like I expected. It felt and looked more like a cake batter than a bread dough. But I went ahead and beat in the butter and then let the dough rest, overnight, in the fridge.

The next morning, I rolled the chilled dough out. It was much easier to handle, cold, but it still seemed mushy. I was unable to find muscovado sugar, so I used dark brown sugar in the filling. Once assembled and in the pan, the dough didn’t rise very much, but it did get a good oven spring. I might have overcooked the babka, as it was a bit dry, and I felt like it needed more filling. Even after baking it, though, it still didn’t have the mouthfeel of a traditional bread. It was more like a cake.

This is probably the only recipe out of Pure Dessert that I felt really didn’t work, and that might have been more my fault then the recipe’s fault.