What do you get when you cross the fall with jewish holidays? Pumpkin pie babka. Duh. Its the perfect marriage between the warming spices in a pumpkin pie and the sweet yeasty babka dough.
Lets be real, though, for a minute. Most regular pumpkin pies are pretty gross. They usually end up resembling something closer to a baby food pie than anything else. The only good pumpkin pies are the ones that basically don’t look like pumpkin pie at all. They’re topped with mile high mounds of sweet crunchy pecans, crumbled ginger bread cookies or mountains of whipped cream. The soft but not smooth texture of a plain ol’ pumpkin pie just doesn’t cut it.
The flavors of a pumpkin pie, on the other hand, are AMAZING. Have you ever noticed that every single food in the supermarket that could be turned into pumpkin pie flavor, comes out in the fall? From Oreos to lattes, jello to teas, and energy bars to granola you can basically buy a pumpkin pie in any form.
So, what do you do when you want to make your own pumpkin pie to serve at the end of your amazing holiday meals? Do you just buy a pack of pumpkin spice oreos and call it a day, or do you serve a mushy baby food version of pumpkin pie?
No way!!!!!!!!!
You take a piece of your challah dough (or you buy a pre-made dough), and you roll up your pumpkin pie into the most comforting of desserts. A huge yummy, warm babka. Then, as if babka-fying your pumpkin pie wasn’t enough, you then decide to up your game a little more and take it over the top with a lotus cookie spread crumb. Now every bite of your pumpkin pie babka is accompanied by the most delicious crumb topping that is laced with the deep dark buttery (but not dairy) caramel-y flavors of the lotus biscoff cookies.
So, this holiday season, that falls out in the depths of apple picking and pumpkin eating season, change things up a little and turn your pie into a babka!