I have a lot of chocolate babkas in my freezer. 13 to be exact. They’re all from my favorite place, Coffee Redefined, in Brooklyn. It takes me over two hours to get there and back, so I only make the trip once a year to fill up my extra freezer. The reason why I am partial to this brand (and trust me, I have tasted almost every single babka on this list!) is that you can choose the level of “done-ness”, ranging from gooey to cakey. I depend on chocolate for fuel, and I’m not very particular about what form it comes in. I do, however, need it to be dense and rich. I don’t care how tasty the flavor profile is, or whether the ingredients are organic or fair trade. If the end product is dry and crumbly, I am not interested. 

A few weeks ago, during a meeting of colleagues-turned-friends who gather monthly (the Jewish Feminist Founders Collaborative, which started two years ago with backing from Chavurot and the Jim Joseph Foundation), we shared an ah-ha moment. Everyone knows about my obsession. In fact, I was in charge of making sure everyone had one of “my” babkas to take home at our last in-person retreat. 

I was bemoaning my broken foot (which happened while I was a scholar in residence in Pittsburgh at the end of May)and the fact that it was too difficult for me to hobble on crutches to get to my precious babka. This immediately sparked a discussion: 

“Why can’t you just have someone get you a piece of babka?” I laughed. “Because they won’t get me the right part.” You see, I only eat the gooey chocolate swirls with just enough cake around them to keep everything intact. If I’m the one cutting the slice, I can perform a very precise babka dissection, extracting only the good parts and leaving the rest. It’s a highly specialized skill: good thing I’m a doctor.

And then someone said, “I never really understood your babka obsession until now. Babka has so many layers of cake-y dough, and sometimes burnt parts. It made no sense. But now that you’re saying that you dig through the outside to get to the middle, I get it. I’m just........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)