Norwegian Coffee Cake: A Yeast-Averse Story

If you've read some of my posts before, you've noticed that I don't make a lot of bread, and that on the rare occasions when I do, I mention my aversion to yeast. Well, maybe it's time I admitted that this aversion I have to yeast is mostly due to my often having a packet of yeast in the cupboard that, logically, hardly ever gets used resulting in the yeast becoming so old and ineffective that, when I finally get around to using it, a fair amount of cursing and imprecations is directed at said yeast when my dough still hasn't risen after 3 hours of pilot-lighting, oven-front sitting, steam bathing, etc...

So imagine my utter delight when, having purchased a brand new shiny packet of yeast a couple of months ago, all my bread endeavors now promptly ferment, bubble and rise and I obtain the bread I was trying to make, my kneading inability notwithstanding.
Really, there are two culprits in this newfound desire I have to actually make bread and brave yeast: their names are Jamie and Deeba. I mentioned both of them in the last post.

What you may not know about them is that Jamie has this fabulous recipe for a chocolate meringue coffee cake on her blog which was the catalyst of my old yeast/new yeast debacle, and Deeba pulls baked goods out of her oven like Mary Poppins pulls whatever she might need out of her bag. So when Jamie declared that she was hosting this month's Bread Baking Day and that the theme of it would be her birthday which was the 28th of January, I felt I really should participate both because she is a dear friend and because she got me to start baking bread. Deeba's contribution was to insist on posting bread after bread after bread, some from the Ottolenghi book which I gave her when she was here for FBC, which heightened my desperation for bread-baking success. 

So out came the Tassajara Bread Book which I purchased last summer with every intention of making a ton of bread, and which went unused until yesterday when I leafed through it looking purposely for a yeasted recipe (yes there is a whole un-yeasted bread section in there) and came upon this Norwegian coffee cake. Flavored with cardamom, which I love, at its simplest, it seemed just the thing to bake on a chilly Sunday.
I had a bar of Valrhona orange chocolate I needed to use and orange and chocolate being two flavors that marry well with cardamom, half of it went into the bread. I could choose any shape and having never baked challah or any other braided bread before, I decided to try a four-stranded braid. Though I knew I'd gone wrong about halfway through the loaf (past the point where the diagrams ended), it wasn't until after I'd put the bread in the oven that I suddenly understood how the weave worked.

It was (and still is because it's huge*) delicious, with an airy, challah-like consistency to the crumb. I haven't been able to stop eating it since I first tore into it, and what remains of it will go into some bread pudding tomorrow.
The most satisfying part of the whole experience was when I gave the tiniest piece of just cardamom-flavored crumb (no chocolate chunks) to Baby Saffron, who hadn't had anything cardamom-flavored yet, to taste and she made this little high-pitched mmmm sound she's just started making recently when she likes food. My heart grew three sizes at that moment.

* The quantities in this recipe make an enormous amount of bread; for human-sized portions you should probably halve it or make two loaves.



Norwegian Coffee Cake
adapted from the Tassajara Bread Book by Edward Espe Brown

Yeast Sponge:
1 1/2 Tbsp dry active yeast
1 1/4 cup (315ml) half-fat milk (or water) slightly warmed (not hot)
1 1/2 cup (190g) all purpose flour
2 Tbsp (26g) brown sugar

Bread: 
1/2 cup + 2 Tbsp (136g) brown sugar
1/2 cup (110g) butter
3 eggs
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp ground cardamom
100g (3.5 oz) chocolate roughly chopped into chunks
3 to 3 1/2 cups all purpose flour + more for kneading
vegetable oil for the bowl in which it will rise

Egg Wash (optional):
1 egg
2 Tbsp water or milk

For the yeast sponge:
- Dissolve the yeast in the lukewarm milk. Add the flour and the 2 Tbsp of sugar and mix well. Cover with a damp towel and leave to rise. The book implies that you can do this while you are preparing the rest, but I actually left my sponge the whole night in my cold kitchen.

For the bread: 
- Preferably using a mixer of some sort for ease, cream the butter (in a stand mixer use the paddle attachment). Cream the sugar into the butter.
- Add the eggs one at a time, beating well before adding the next.
- Mix the salt and the cardamom.
- Fold the butter/sugar mixture and the salt/cardamom mixture into the yeast sponge.
- Fold any extras such as the chocolate chunks into the mixture (I actually forgot to do this and had to add the chocolate right before the bread went into the oven...oops).
- Fold the flour in until you form a soft dough. I needed all 3 1/2 cups but you might only need 3.
- Turn the dough out onto a floured surface and adding flour as needed, knead it into a smooth dough (it took me about 10mn).
- Using the vegetable oil, lightly grease a large bowl. Put your kneaded dough into it, making sure to coat it lightly with oil (I do this by rolling it around in the bowl a couple of times), then cover with a damp kitchen towel and leave to rise in a warm place for at least 30-40mn or until it has doubled in size.
- Shape your bread as desired. If you make the whole quantity, you might want to divide the dough in half and make two loaves.
- Preheat your oven to 350-375˚F (180-190˚C).
- Place the loaf on a sheet of baking paper or on a greased baking pan. Cover with the damp kitchen towel and leave to rise in a warm place for at least 20-30mn or until it has doubled in size again.
- For a golden crust, make an eggwash: beat the egg and milk together and using a pastry brush, brush onto your loaf right before it goes into the oven.
- Bake for 45-50mn or until the crust is golden brown.