October Daring Bakers Challenge: Povitica (Don’t Ask Me How to Pronounce It)

First up, cookies for the Script last month were well received.  They thoroughly enjoyed them and were very impressed.  Then I took some cookies to Bob Schneider who may have been impressed, but I don’t know since he said he wasn’t even going to look at them because it would be downhill from there.  You better have eaten them, Bob!

Now to the challenge of the month.  I wasn’t able to complete last months Daring Bakers Challenge at the Daring Kitchen, so I used a United Way bake sale fundraiser at work to motivate me to do this months.  Glad I did too, because it was quite tasty.  Ever heard of povitica?  Yeah, me neither.

Basically, it is a sweet dough (fun with yeast!) that includes scalded milk.  Then the dough is rolled out thinly, a ground nut mixture is spread on top, and it is rolled up and coiled about to make a loaf of bread that has distinct spiral designs.  I really enjoy making dough now.  I used to dislike yeast because I didn’t like the idea of cultivating living organisms to cook and eat later.  That probably explains why I don’t like yogurt.  But after a few Daring Bakers challenges that focused on yeast doughs, I find them fun and delicious.  And they’re super easy with my fabulous KitchenAid mixer and dough hook.

I whipped up this challenge in 4 hours which is pretty good considering that the dough has to rest for an hour and a half and bake for about 50 minutes.  Since I took it to work for the United Way fundraiser, I combined the dough for what should have been two loaves and baked in a bundt pan.  It gave me a tall loaf that I was able to slice up and wrap individual portions easily in plastic wrap.  Okay, I also used the bundt pan because I only have one normal bread loaf pan and didn’t want to spend ALL night baking.

The only modifications I made from the classic povitica recipe was that in the filling, I ran out of walnuts so I used a mixture of walnuts and almonds.  I also substituted some of the white sugar for brown sugar and in the filling and added a little bit of maple syrup.  It was yummy, though I only saved two small pieces for myself.  My coworkers usually benefit from my baking challenge so I was glad to help out United Way this time.

              

The Daring Baker’s October 2011 challenge was Povitica, hosted by Jenni of The Gingered Whisk. Povitica is a traditional Eastern European Dessert Bread that is as lovely to look at as it is to eat!