When I bake, it comes from a place of love. I feed people to show I care. I create elaborate desserts to express my feelings, doughy testaments to the depths of my unconditional affection. Except for the first time I baked a babka. That was an experience fueled by a rage so powerful only the melted chocolate oozing out of the doughy yet crisp loaf could assuage it.

It was season seven of the Great British Bake Off, my comfort show, and Benjamina was baking a chocolate, tahini and almond babka. It sounded delightful. Benjamina was one of my favorite contestants and she was baking a very Jewish dessert. I felt seen. Then Paul Hollywood showed up and ruined it all. He smugly insisted that Benjamina was baking a couronne, not a babka, because she twisted the dough into a circle instead of a loaf pan.

Excuse you Paul Hollywood. Then go take several seats.

While I myself had never baked a babka, Jewish people had been doing so for ages. I often spotted them twisted into rounds in local bakeries, and I would be damned if I was going to let Paul Hollywood dictate the rules of Jewish dessert.

My people contained multitudes. So could our desserts.

Modern Jewish Baker was already loaded on my Kindle. I had achieved success with some of the challah recipes, my favorite being the garlic and za’atar bread, but something had scared me off from trying the babka. A proper loaf needs to be proofed twice and the rolling, filling and shaping process is fairly involved. Plus everything needs to be coated in sugar syrup several times while baking. I wasn’t sure it was worth the effort.

I was wrong. Fueled by my desire to prove Paul didn’t know a babka from a bagel I decided to try the S’mores babka recipe. Sarna’s instructions were clear, her photos made the shaping process easy to understand, and the babka rings baked up to perfection.

As with several recipes in the book, I needed to make a few adjustments to get the dough to the consistency described, but this did not bother me. In fact, I found the recipes surprisingly malleable and forgiving. My babka technique improved with practice and I began experimenting with my own flavors and fillings using Sarna’s recipes as a base.

They came out perfect every single time.

So when the Great British Bake Off recently featured a babka challenge in which half the contests didn’t even know what babka was and Paul Hollywood completely ignored the fact that true babkas are proofed twice, I kept my cool. I knew how to make babka. What they were doing wasn’t it.

In the subsequent week I was delighted to find several articles interviewing Shannon Sarna about babkas and setting the record straight. I didn’t bother finishing that season of the Great British Bake off. I was too busy baking babkas of my own.

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