French bread & chocolate swirl coffee cake

Tonight we attended a dinner party with some of my old work friends from Fibre-Craft. I asked each couple to pick a bread from my bread challenge, and we all shared at the end of the night. Sounds like a pretty fun party to me!

Rosa suggested I bring French bread, which was a pretty normal bread. Just yeast, flour, warm water, and salt.

I don't know what I did, but it was really soft to work with. I can't wait to try it with butter and honey tomorrow morning for breakfast! (It made two loaves, so we had plenty for all three couples.)

Tony requested chocolate swirl coffee cake, which I had been eyeing for some time, so I was more than happy to bake it and share.

This was kind of a complicated dough. Here's a breakdown of the steps:

1. Mix flour and yeast.
2. Melt butter, sugar, water, and evaporated milk until it's 115 to 120 degrees.
3. Mix together, add egg yolks and some more flour; knead, and allow to rise. (This bread required a lot of rising time - two hours!)
4. Punch down, then turn out of the bowl and roll out to a long sheet.
5. Make chocolate sauce: dark chocolate, cinnamon, evaporated milk, and sugar.
6. Spread chocolate sauce on dough and roll up like so:
   

After that, you somehow heave it into a round tube pan, make crumbles for the top (cinnamon, butter, flour, and sugar). This is no easy feat. The dough is very sticky, and part of my roll got stuck to my board, even though I obviously floured it pretty well. Also, I was afraid that if I picked it up and put too much pressure on some parts of the dough, the chocolate sauce would ooze everywhere. So, I got it into the tube pan by picking the whole thing up, wax paper and all, and dropping it in somewhat ungracefully. Oh well, I got the job done.

When you get it into the pan, you have to allow to rise for another hour. Then you bake it and you end up with a beautiful tube-shaped coffee cake with cinnamon crumbles on top.


I was pretty excited about this, and I hope to have a slice for breakfast tomorrow, as well. (It's going to be a lot of bread, what with the French bread and now this!)

We cut a piece for Tony, the birthday boy, and then divided this bread up, as well. You can see the cute little swirl!

I loved how much cinnamon was in this cake. I have to admit, after I spread the chocolate sauce over the rolled dough, I licked the spoon, and it was everything I thought it could be.

I'd like to make this again, maybe for Christmas at Dave's family's house this year. It would be breakfast for a lot of people! And think of how amazing it would be with some big, thick slices of banana...

Success for both breads! That's two more breads down in my challenge, for a total of about six down. Next week I'd like to make some that I'll mail out to the people that requested them long-distance!