These days, everyone and their grandma is obsessed with babka. Honestly, it’s hard not to be. The buttery loaf cake, which typically comes swirled with chocolate or cinnamon, is a highlight of the Eastern European Jewish dessert cannon. But as wonderful as babka is, devotees to the old school Jewish bakery swear by a lesser-known baked good: kokosh. Like babka, kokosh comes twisted with layers of chocolate. The two look similar enough that kokosh is often informally described as the Hungarian take on babka—a squat and homely, though no less tasty, cousin to the majestic Polish-Jewish cake. My personal take on kokosh is something of a hybrid. I love the flavors of chocolate and poppy seed separately, I enjoy them even more together. So I combine them into a single filling, grinding the blue-black seeds into a nutty powder and simmering them with cocoa, milk, and sugar to form a thick, spreadable paste. A hint of coffee and orange deepens and rounds out the flavor. A slice of warm kokosh may not hold the same star power as babka, but it will never let you down.

Read the recipe on Food52.com