Danish Chocolate Streusel-swirled Coffee Cake

Is this a cake? Err... maybe not. I'm not too sure of the definition of coffee cakes but personally, I think that this doesn't seems to be a cake to me at all.

I'm baking these Chocolate Danish bread for The Home Bakers and this is the tenth bake for this event. THB is an baking event organised by my friend, Joyce from Kitchen Flavours. With a group of gorgeous ladies, we are baking all recipes from the book, "Coffee Cakes" by Lou Seibert Pappas until every recipe has been baked from this book.

I'm not too sure why Lou named this bread as a coffee cake. Or maybe this bread has to be named as a coffee cake so that the recipe can be included in her "Coffee Cakes" book... Seriously, I am happy that she did this because this recipe is really fantastic!

Being a health freak, I wasn't very happy at first seeing that I need to use 2 sticks of butter for this bake. And so, I have decided to use 1/3 of the recipe to bake this "cake" and baked them into individual Danish breads instead of one or two loaves. After baking, I'm now very satisfied and happy with all my bakes and can truly appreciate the "beauty" of this recipe.

Having a large proportion of butter, this brioche-like bread dough is more oily than most traditional bread dough. The clever part of this recipe that it has transform an buttery bread into a Danish pastry-like bread by using the chocolate streusel to form swirls and layers inside the dough. With these layers of chocolate, these breads taste like Danish pastries... Very delicious!

Now, is this a bread? or a Danish pastry? A bread that looks like a Danish pastry but contain less butter than a Danish pastry. Is this a beauty?

My Danish chocolate streusel-swirled BREAD... coffee cake? Nay!

The chocolate streusel filling for this bread

Shaping my bread

Happy with the shape of my bread :D

Before and after baking...

Love this beautiful bread texture... It tastes like a Danish pastry!

Being the rule of this event, only the host of the chosen bake can post the recipe in her blog post. Please visit Anuja from Simple Baking for the detailed recipe of this bake.

And, here are the notes and modifications that I made for my bake.

My ingredients list (which is 1/3 amount of the original recipe)

"Cake" Dough
1 tsp dry yeast

100 ml water

20g sugar

60g butter

a pinch of salt

2/3 tsp vanilla extract

1 egg

225g bread flour + 1 tbsp bread flour

1 tbsp milk powder

Chocolate Streusel

40g sugar

12g all purpose flour

30g butter
(increased from 15g to 30g for a less crumbly streusel)

1 tbsp cocoa powder

1/3 tsp ground cinnamon

Egg wash

1 egg yolk

2 tbsp milk

Using this amount of ingredients of the above recipe, I've baked 6 swirl breads at 190°C fan forced for 20 min.

Modifications that I have made from the original:

• To make bread dough, I've placed all my ingredients into my bread-maker and use "dough" setting to knead and prove the dough for 1 hr in the bread-maker.
• I have used bread flour instead of all purpose flour to make the dough.
• I have replaced the milk into to the dough with the same volume of water and 1 tbsp milk powder.
• I have increased the amount of cocoa powder in the streusel from 2/3 tbsp to 1 tbsp.
• Instead shaping the bread into a large loaf, I have adapted the bread shaping technique from the book, The Second book of Baking for Beginner by Carol (in Chinese language) to make my bread into 6 individual swirl breads. Although I was lousy with my Chinese language and got lost in translation in my previous post with this book. LOL! Luckily, this shaping technique is easy to follow as there is no translation involved. LOL- again!
• Instead of using egg white and sliced almond to glaze and top the bread before baking, mine were brushed with my version of egg wash.

Happy Baking

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