• Blah, blah, blah: Mila and Ashton is really happening.

• The New York Post sent a gift basket to Ahmadinejad, in town for the U.N. General Assembly. The contents? “Gold’s Borscht, Manischewitz Gefilte Fish, H&H bagels, onion bialys and Zabar’s cream cheese.”

• Natalie Portman is blonde now.

• Israel didn’t make it to the World Baseball Classic, which means we won’t see Kevin Youkilis playing for the Holy Land after all.

• The Broke Girl’s Guide to Living Like Clueless’ Cher Horowitz, courtesy of Hello Giggles.

• Homeland won big at the Emmy’s last night, and Claire Danes stole the show with the most amazing line ever: “Mandy Patinkin, holla.”

The post Daily Jewce: Homeland Wins Big At the Emmys, ‘Mandy Patinkin, Holla’ appeared first on Jewcy.

As the name suggests, grandmothers were typically the bakers behind the babka. In the Encyclopedia of Jewish Food, Gil Marks writes that the dessert was most likely the result of extra challah dough that was cleverly turned into an additional treat by mid-19th-century Eastern European bubbes. And thank god for that! Somewhere between a bread and a cake, the sweet loaf-shaped delicacy can be eaten for breakfast, as a midday snack, or, more traditionally, as a dessert. On the off chance there are any leftovers, it’s also great for making French toast or bread pudding.

While originally stuffed with dried fruit and cinnamon, in the last half-century American Jews have immortalized chocolate babka as the premiere variety. (You may remember the Seinfeld episode when Elaine famously dubbed cinnamon the “lesser babka.”)

Even now, with babka something of a household name for Jewish and non-Jewish New Yorkers alike, if bubbe isn’t baking it, you’re probably not eating it. No longer available only in haimish bakeries, babka can be found in Zabars, Zaros, and even Bouchon Bakeries—though the recipe has, somewhat shockingly, remained the same.

Why make babka, available by the dozen at your neighborhood bakery, on your own? I could tell you to make one to be true to your roots, to honor your grandparents, or to finally use up that instant yeast packet in your cabinet. But the reason is simpler than that. There are few things in this world more delicious than fresh bread, straight out of the oven. One of those things just happens to be fresh bread straight out of the oven with melted chocolate and butter oozing out of it.

These “Trail Mix Babka Cupcakes” are a contemporary twist on the classic loaf, keeping with the latest in the cupcake-craze and portion controlled for the weight conscious among us. Simply pairing chocolate and cinnamon filling into one cupcake produces an original recipe while preserving the integrity of babka’s history. Bake a dozen and send a basket to your bubbe!

Not Your Bubbe’s Trail-Mix Babka Cupcakes
Yield: 14-16 Babka Cupcakes

Ingredients:
Dough
¾ cup milk or soy milk
¼ cup melted butter or margarine
2 teaspoons fast-acting dry yeast
1 teaspoon cinnamon
2 ½ cups all purpose flour
1 ½ cups whole wheat flour
¼ cup + one teaspoon sugar
¼ cup water
1 egg
½ teaspoon salt

Trail-mix Filling
10 oz. chocolate chips
1 ½ teaspoons cinnamon
1/3 cup sugar
1/3 cup cold butter or margarine
1/3 cup chopped nuts (walnuts, peanuts, or almonds)
1/3 cup chopped dried fruit (raisins, craisins, apricots, or dried apple work well)

Streusel Topping (Optional)
1/3 cup confectioners sugar
1/3 cup all purpose flour
¼ cup butter or margarine
1 tablespoon milk or soymilk
Egg wash (one egg beaten with one tablespoon milk/soy milk)

Special Equipment
Stand mixer (recommended but not essential)
Rolling pin
Cupcake pans

Directions:
1. Melt butter or margarine in saucepan and stir in the milk.

2. Warm milk and melted butter slightly and add the yeast and the teaspoon of sugar, let sit for five minutes until the yeast blooms.

3. While waiting, combine the all purpose four, whole wheat flour, cinnamon, and sugar into the bowl of your stand mixer. Mix to combine.

4. Add the egg, water, yeast, and milk mixture and mix well. Using the dough hook (or your hands if you are not using a stand mixer) knead the dough for 15-20 minutes, until the dough is smooth and elastic.

5. Cover the dough with a damp cloth and place in a warm place for 1 ½ hours for the dough to rise and double in size. In this time, you can make the filling and topping.

6. For the filling, mix together all ingredients except for the butter.

7. Rub, or cut, the butter into the mixture until it is relatively evenly dispersed and you have no clumps larger than the size of a cranberry.

8. For the streusel, combine all ingredients and, like the filling, cut the butter in until you get crumbs the size of pebbles.

9. Once risen, punch the dough down and reform it into a ball. Let sit, covered, for another 10 minutes.

10. To make the process more manageable, cut the dough into two equal portions.

11. Spray cupcake tin and preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Take one half of the dough and roll it into a large rectangle about 1/8 of an inch thick. Sprinkle half of the filling evenly over the rectangle, then cut the rectangle into smaller rectangles, roughly 2 inches wide and 4 inches long. Roll up the rectangles, maintaining the width, and seal the seam by pressing down on the dough. Coil the babka ropes into the cupcake pan. Repeat the process with the other half of the dough.

12. Once inside the cupcake tin, cover and let rise for a half hour. Brush with egg wash and sprinkle with streusel. Bake for 12-14 minutes. Once cool enough to touch pop them out and enjoy! They are best while still warm.

Also try: Not Your Bubbe’s Chicken Schnitzel

Sarah Miller is a graduate of the Pastry and Baking Arts program at the Institute of Culinary Education and is currently working at ABC Kitchen.

The post Not Your Bubbe’s Recipe: Chocolate and Cinnamon Babka Cupcakes appeared first on Jewcy.

Went to 92Y this Monday — it was my first visit to what Jon Stewart called “the third holiest site in the Jewish Religion,” after the Wailing Wall and Zabar’s. I had been warned that it was a dark place, an alternate universe comprised of old Upper East Side Jews ravenous for their next nosh of culture. The agenda that night, an installment of the 2010 Reading Series with authors Lori Moore and Jonathan Franzen, wasn’t even remotely Jewish, but I was fully prepared for the equivalent of a matinee concert at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

As I approached the holy landmark, I was pleasantly surprised to not have been the lone kid in the pool during JCC senior swim. While hundreds of patrons of all ages, sizes, and creeds swarmed the building, they all somehow managed to embody the cultured Jewish persona imposed upon them by their surroundings.

The Kaufmann Concert Hall is a beautiful venue, one that would appeal to any Jew growing up with grandparents with an affinity for decorating with fine wood. The impressive sound system hovered above an audience sitting as one sea of Jewish literati. Never before had I owned that as my identity, but like the Indonesian man by the aisle and the non-Jewish authors on the stage, we had been swept into the kibbutz of the YM-YWHA.

Looking around as editors Victoria Wilson and Jonathan Galassi introduced Moore and Franzen over the course of the evening, the audience seemed moved, devouring the writers’ non sequitors, innuendos, and profundities.

Franzen’s observations of the reproachful mother paired with his nasal disposition helped him seem like one of the crowd, while Lori Moore was the darling of the evening, revving up the bookish audience with such semantic wanderings of the mind as, “I would imagine things like ergonomic meant thereforishness.” Franzen’s handling of the typically New York question from the audience, “Why are Midwesterners so funny,” satisfied them with a diasporic observation: “There are a lot of humorless Midwesterners…people who leave the Midwest behind have developed some coping skills, such as flight. So maybe people who can master one coping skill can master others, like humor.” Explosions of laughter from the balcony below EINSTEIN and the aisles by BEETHOVEN outed the displaced Midwesterners, who, like me, had made their pilgrimage and worked their way seamlessly into the fabric of sophisticated New York Jewry that evening.

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