Bábovka

HDR bábovka with coconut, nom nom!

The reason why it took me a week to make a new post is that I've been trying to find the best recipe for another Czech recipe - the wonderful bábovka [baah-boph-kah]. I made three different bábovkas in the past week, three different recipes and three different results. Since you probably have no idea what a bábovka is, I tried to find a translation and the most plausible one is "pound cake". Yet, my English flatmate has never heard about pound cakes so let me describe bábovka for you: it is a rather thick, somewhat heavy (as opposed to fluffy) cake that is VERY easy to bake and its charm is in its variability. You can bake bábovka theoretically with everything - fruit, nuts, jam, yogurth, heavy cream, poppy seeds, coconut, etc.

The recipe I chose is really simple so it's a good entry bábovka. It's made from only 2 eggs, that gives it its heavyness and it is good if you want a frosting of some kind on your bábovka (chocolate frosting is very usual), or you can up it to 4 and have a softer variant which isn't too good for a frosting. It's so called mug-recipe - that means that you do not need any scales or measuring cups, just take one average sized mug and use it to measure everything. It doesn't matter if the mug is a bit bigger, you will just end up with more cake.

Note: The real bábovka is usually baked in a special spiral-ish form that gives it its characteristic shape but since you can get them only in the Czech Republic or Slovakia, you can use any cake form that will make a hole in the middle - you want to make it donut-shaped.

Bábovka

a word of advice: don't use condensed milk as the sole frosting.

you will need:

• 2 eggs
• 2 mugs of all-purpose flour
• 1 mug of sugar (I prefer brown sugar here but white is alright too)
• 1 mug of milk
• cocoa powder
• 1/2 mug of vegetable or olive oil (the olive oil must be as soft and virgin as possible, otherwise you'll get a hint of olive in your bábovka and you might not appreciate it)
• 3/4 of a packet of baking powder (or just a bit above average than you usually put into your cakes)

1. Preheat the oven to 175 degrees Celsius. Grease and flour the form slightly.
2. Mix the flour with the sugar and the baking powder in a bowl. Add the eggs, the milk and the oil and mix the dough well. If it clumps together, deal with it with force :)
3. Pour about 3/4 of the dough into the form. Take the cocoa powder and add it into the remaining dough until it gets clearly browner than the original colour. Mix the powder in well and pour it on the beige dough in the form. Pro-tip: You can pour it only in the middle or only to one side of the form for interesting shapes in the final product.
4. Put it in the oven for about 40 - 45 minutes. After that, check with inserting a toothpick in the middle; if you pull it out clean, then the cake is ready.
5. Let cool, serve either dusted with confectioners' sugar or a frosting of your choice.

this is how grandmothers do it (from wikipedia)