Nate, his mom, and I are up in Cape Cod this weekend for the marathon. He’s taking a break from his usual full marathons and only running the half. Yeah, this is like a piece of cake to him. Meanwhile, I doubt I could even run 1 mile right now.

I totally forgot about posting this for the Daring Bakers today so I’m getting this post up quick.

In case you were wondering, Povitica (pronounced po-va-teet-sa), is traditional Eastern European dessert bread that is usually served during the holiday season. It is also known as Nutroll, Potica, Kalachi, Strudia, just to name a few.  I’m not sure if it’s related to Babka, but it seems very similar to that as well. Each loaf is filled with a sweet filling and rolled, and weighs an amazing 2.5 pounds!

The traditional filling for this bread is an English walnut filling, but other typical fillings also include apple/cinnamon, apricot preserves, and a sweet cheese (like cream cheese). I chose to make one traditional and one with a chocolate twist on the traditional.

The recipe called for ground walnuts, but I used chopped, and it really messed up the traditionally-filled one. Rather than having a sweet paste in the middle, the sugar got absorbed by the dough and I was left with just a nutty bread.

For the chocolate one, I replaced one cup of the nuts with a cup of dark chocolate chips and decreased the sugar amount by half. It was mighty tasty!

You’ll have to excuse me for not writing much, as we’re about to head out to get dinner! Anyway, I took off work today and tomorrow so I’m psyched for this long weekend :)