I found a recipe for a brioche-dough coffee cake ring in Julia Child's book The Way to Cook and it has been in my dreams since then, waiting for the opportunity to be realized. This week was that chance. A brioche dough is rich to the tune of four eggs and 1-1/2 sticks of butter so it made perfect sense for a rich pastry.
I made one batch of dough and let it rise the prescribed 45 minutes. I didn't see any change whatsoever. So I did what any reasonable baker would do, namely fret about the weather and wonder if I had killed the yeast. But I was also determined not to let this lump of dough get the best of me, so I made another batch of dough. Four more eggs, 1-1/2 sticks of butter, and 45 minutes later, I had another batch of dough with no visible rise. Desperate, I put a piece of the original batch of dough into the oven. It puffed up fairly nicely, so I knew the yeast wasn't dead. I decided to use the first batch to make a practice set of pastries and use the second batch for the final pieces.
Since the coffee cake recipe only required a half recipe of dough, I decided to use the rest for a chocolate babka. If you don't know what a babka is, it is a wonderful chocolate roll that was the subject of a Seinfeld episode (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dinner_Party_(Seinfeld)).
After kneading the dough, I gave it a first rise of about an hour in a greased pan. I then punched it down and let it rise again overnight in the refrigerator. In the morning, I rolled out and formed the dough. The ring coffee cake requires a long, narrow piece of dough. The filling consisted of walnuts, raisins, brown sugar, and cinnamon. My practice coffee cake included a little molasses in the filling, which gave it a wonderful flavor, but unfortunately I forgot to add it in the release version.
