Chocolate Brooklyn Babka

Brand: Trader Joes

Cost: $4.99

Found at: Trader Joe’s

I’ve missed you Trader Joes.

Oh, how I’ve missed you. 

I’ve missed your over-the-top hipster treats. I’ve missed your niche foreign foods. I’ve missed feeling like I’m saving money when I’m spending my entire paycheck on cauliflower rice. I’ve not missed the weird and borderline insensitive Trader Joes sub-brands… but that’s a story for another day. 

And BOY have I missed this Babka. Alexia brought this home one day, back in 2016, and since then I have been obsessed. It’s chocolatey and doughy and soft – like Nutella meets challah meets moose tracks ice-cream. In the subsequent years of travel and personal growth, I have not forgotten where I came from. And where I come from is the land where you can buy cake and call it bread.

I recently brought it home to introduce my parents to it. Suffice it to say that they were suspicious. As good Northwesterners, anything remotely “East-Coast” is automatically a red flag. New York, doubly so. But it came from our store, and so they gave it a try. And in equally iconic West Coast fashion, they pretended to be ambivalent.

“Yeah, its ok.” Said my mother.  

“Different.” Agreed my father. 

But when I came home from work today, I discovered that it was all gone. The babka wins again.