Now that we're back in the dudgeon of winter, with punishing wind thrashing the atmosphere of temperatures that plunge into the minus-20C region at night and manage to nudge up to minus-8C during the day, it seems as good a time as any to find comfort in spending more time in the kitchen. As in trying out new recipes, type of thing. To bake special desserts that fragrance the house, and grace the dinner table for dessert.

I came across an interesting recipe a week ago at a website I occasionally look at, Tablet. It was the photograph accompanying the recipe and the name of it that caught my eye: Chocolate Babka. Yeast-raised breads are a favourite of my husband's. He also enjoys chocolate flavours, but is very picky about their combination. I turned to him to ask whether he was interested; if so, I would download the recipe, and he enthusiastically responded "yes"!

I had merely glanced at the recipe. I'm an old hand at baking and there isn't much that makes me balk at ingredients and preparation, but I was still surprised when the recipe printed out on three full pages of ingredients and instructions. I set it aside and decided I'd give it a try. And that time was yesterday, for Friday-night dessert.

First thing I always do when making such a product is half any recipe, and so I did with this one. The instructions for the dough were quite precise: the use of an electric mixer with a dough hook, and I'd long ago surrendered the one I had to the Salvation Army thrift shop because I rarely used it, much preferring to do my preparations by hand. So I assembled the ingredients and prepared the dough with half the recipe amounts. The dough was to be made the day before the dessert was to be assembled and baked. I did that. Quite the dough, too, inclusive of eggs, butter, grated lemon zest, nutmeg, which was why the creator, one Melissa Clark, recommended day-before preparation, to enable all the constituent parts to meld their flavours.

The dough recipe was followed by a recipe for the fudge filling. Which was followed by a recipe for the 'chocolate streusel' to be sprinkled over the finished product before baking. And yet another for the 'syrup', which I decided to forego; the syrup meant to infuse the baked product, which I felt was rather extraneous.

I ran into problems with the fudge filling which, when prepared was far too watery to be a reliable 'filling', so I set about thickening it, with the addition of flour. The streusel topping called for among other things chocolate chips and though I added them, I would delete them a second time around.

The assembling of the dessert was fine, albeit a little picky. The reward was, of course, the finished, baked product. It was worth the time and effort it took to put it together, all three pages of ingredients and instructions. My husband loved it and I just might make it again, some time in the future.

When I'd finished with the baking and cleaned up the kitchen, off we went for our daily ravine walk in the snowy, frigid forest, to the delight of our two puppies. But it was extremely cold, and we went at a good pace, to work up some warming interior steam, all of us.