A Few Stollen Moments

Once upon a time there was a girl called Whitney and she sang like an angel.  This post is not about her, although I could not resist naming this post after one of her greatest hits.  This year, I decided to try out my baking skills on that well-known German Christmas favourite, stollen. 

Stollen

To be honest, I did not intend to write about stollen this year.  I meant to share about my first experience creating a beautiful, iced sugee cake.  But the icing turned out a little less stiff and somewhat messy.  Certainly nothing to post pretty pictures about.  So, in the tradition of sharing a recipe every Christmas, I decided to go with the stollen.  After all, there are Eurasians of German descent too (at least I think so).  And we've gone through the pineapple tarts, mince pies, sugee, fruit cake, shortbread etc etc.  

Stollen is essentially a yeasted bread, filled with fruit and marzipan, and covered with a snow-like layer of icing sugar.  I took up breadmaking this year and frankly enjoy kneading the bread, the texture and heft of the dough, the smell of bread baking in the oven and of course the delectable goodness of freshly baked bread.  So when I found a nice-looking recipe from Paul Hollywood (of Great British Bake-off fame), I knew it was time to do a Christmas bread.

It's a straightforward recipe - prepare the dough, add the fruit and spices and let it rise, then roll it out, and add the marzipan.  Many recipes require that the marzipan be rolled up like a sausage in the middle of the loaf but Paul's doesn't - you roll it out thinly and then roll it up with the dough.  This way the marzipan is better distributed in the loaf itself.  (I used half the amount of marzipan stipulated in the recipe.... ours is not a sweet toothed family, and the dried fruit is already sweet.) Let stand for another hour, then bake.

So does it look like a babe in swaddling clothes?

When ready, it is apparently meant to resemble the baby Jesus, wrapped in swaddling clothes.  Indeed my effort did have a certain resemblance....

I should probably have left it in the oven for another 15 minutes or so, for it did turn out a little underbaked (as Hollywood would say). But it was still a tasty, buttery, fruity loaf, full of Christmas flavours. Perfect with a cup of coffee, for a stollen moment on a busy Christmas morning.

Merry Christmas to all!