Chocolate Challah Egg Bread

Here is another baked good I made for the Easter season. It is a challah bread, which is basically a rich, four-strand braided egg bread. It is something like a braided Easter egg bread, which is often pictured with colored hard-boiled eggs tucked into the pockets of it braids. I made traditional Easter egg bread last year, so this year I decided to make something a little different. 

This braided challah bread is made just like traditional challah and Easter egg bread, but this version contains chopped chocolate. This bread dough is made from yeast, flour, eggs, plus the addition of two extra egg yolks for richness. It also contains honey in place of regular sugar, and oil instead of butter. The dough is made, kneaded for about 10 minutes, then placed in a bowl to rise for an hour. Then it is punched down, the chocolate is added, and it is divided into four long ropes. Then it is braided, and allowed to rise for another hour, before it is finally baked for about 30 minutes. It is very important with this recipe to oil the dough, just lightly enough to coat it, so that it won't stick and it will be a lot easier to work with.

I used chopped dark chocolate, but my taste-testers thought the recommended semi-sweet chocolate would have been a better match. This bread is a sweet bread, but it is still bread, so it is not overly sweet. Semi-sweet chocolate would have added a hint of sweetness and probably would have worked better, although I did like the dark chocolate, as I am a big fan of dark chocolate. I have never braided anything using four strands before, so bread was probably not the best place to start.  However, I did practice using strings beforehand, but my braiding still din't turn out the best. I also found it a bit difficult to make the end where the strands start into a nice braid. Maybe I should stick to three strands. Looks aside, the bread turned out to be quite tasty. It was light and fluffy, but had a nice, crisp exterior. It was tender and soft, and makes a good snack or breakfast. It would be excellent spread with chocolate hazelnut spread.