a black sesame and milk babka and a chocolate chestnut babka

Sending emails is a bit nervewracking. Part of this is because I tend to overthink what I send in emails (I should apply some of that thinking to what I say in blog posts so they don’t all consist solely of: oh, I enjoy blogging + oh, I am a bit tired lately). The other part of this is because somehow what I write seems to get interpreted in all sorts of different ways. Sometimes mildly different from what I intended.

When it does I don’t know what to do. Am I making too much of a fuss if I insist and correct them? Well that, it depends, as with more things, on the magnitude of the misunderstanding.

It’s a bit easier with texting–when things get tight or uneasy, pull out an emoji and huzzah! It’s also a bit easier with blogging because I act more freely with the exclamation marks which can ensure that any statement comes across as positive. Additionally, I permit myself to produce plenty of long run-on sentences and a few too many parentheses (I like to assure myself it’s style) which gives me enough room to explain myself in typical longwinded fashion.

When you write emails, you have to convey what you feel without any facial expression or body language (email sarcasm is much too high level for me). It would even help if I could write emails in third person. For example: Please fix this immediately, the email-writer wrote cheerfully and pleasantly. See? No room for misinterpretation.

Oh well, it’s just another sort of writing that requires another sort of skill…and a good eye for catching the connotations of diction and punctuation. 

I’ve been meaning to make some babka for quite a while. I’m glad I finally got around to it.

My favourite was the black sesame babka–mostly due to the milky and and sugary glaze. It was, however, very generously filled, which makes it difficult to slice nicely without each slice crumbling into delicious bits of bread and black sesame.

The chocolate and chestnut babka was alright. It would have been nicer if it had a glaze as well. On it’s own, it was barely sweet and tasted a bit sour (yes indeed, you dear sourdough starter) and so it was a bit disconcerting going in with the expectation of a sweet bread. Alternatively, as a savoury bitter chocolate bread it was fairly nice.

There are also two different rolling methods that I tried. The black sesame method looks a bit pretty from up top, but both work quite nicely.

babka: Loosely adapted from Food and Wine January 2016. Article by Tina Ujlaki, recipe by Melissa Weller.