Final Pan Am post! Aren’t you excited? I know I sure am! (well…I’m actually most excited about getting back all my lost “can’t drive in the 3+HOV lane” time). Don’t be sad about this being the final post though, I don’t want to cause a Pan-demic! (yes, I literally only included that sentence for the horrible pun opportunity. I’m sure you’d already come up with that pun all by yourself before I even said it. To which I say kudos to you my fellow kindred spirit).
Although I recognize that my supposedly “international” month has been pretty heavily European (which is actually ridiculous when you think about it. Despite me saying that it’s a PanAm inspired month, I opted not to make any dishes from any nation that would actually participate in said games. It wasn’t completely on purpose, although I suppose it’s entirely possible that my PanAm prejudice/ dislike was showing, so I was unconsciously shunning all those places. Or maybe it’s just because the Europeans really know their desserts?)
Either way, this week I present to you the German Stollen (aka what is essentially German fruitcake). Now I know what you’re thinking – “Amber, that is wrong on so many levels. #1 – Nobody likes fruitcake (that’s not true! I like it…when it’s done right. If you’ve only ever had fruitcake that can double as either siding for your house or as a tsunami stopping barricade, then I completely understand where you’re coming from. But things don’ t have to be that way!). #2 – Fruitcake is known the world over as being a Christmas dessert, and we are smack dab in the middle of the year – almost literally as far away from Christmas on both sides as you could possibly be (ok, you may have a point there, but I am posting this pretty close to the 25th of July, does that count for something? No? Well…in that case I got nothin’). #3 …well there is no #3, but I just felt like if I was going to make a list, it needed a minimum of 3 items, so I guess #3 Amber, your list making skills are terrible!” 🙂
Unlike last week, this turned out fantastically, and I truly did feel like a child at Christmas while taste testing every stage of this delicious endeavour. There are apparently a few riffs on Stollen that you can make, but I opted to do the marzipan-filled variety. Partly because my cupboard already contained the requisite amount of marzipan, and also…marzipan – is any more of an explanation really needed? When I saw that any marizpan version of this recipe involved rolling your marzipan into a log and wrapping it up like a Christmas present in delicious cakey dough (wherein the “wrapping paper” is almost as good as the present. This is one of those situations where – unlike when an infant gets a present and prefers the box/ wrapping paper to the gift -you don’t need to be irked, because both parts are the gift!), I was hooked and instantly wanted to make it.
I have to admit, this actually didn’t taste the way I was expecting it to, since it’s typically described as being a German fruit cake. The flavour to me was more a cross between fruitcake and hot cross buns (ha! a “cross” get it? *forehead most definitely slapped in embarrassment*). This flavour desciption is not at all a complaint on my part, quite the opposite actually, I’d been expecting a much denser/ heavier (wintery-er?) taste, but the Stollen turned out surprisingly light and drool-inducing.
Now I did end up not wrapping the dough quite as thoroughly as I should have around the marzipan. At first when my Stollen came out of the oven and I saw baked on bits of melted marzipan on the pan which had leaked out of the centre of the bread, I was a little sad. But not for long, because then I proceeded to eat all the marzipan bits and realized that if I make this again, I might just have to “accidentally” not wrap it tightly enough agian 😉 . It was like that joy you get from eating the burnt/ crispy bits of cheese when you homemake pizza, or the crispy edges of a brownie (aka to die for. Or…to Die Hard for, and then you also have yourself a movie franchise).
I shamelessly stole/borrowed this recipe completely from here. Usually I make a bunch of changes to things when I find online recipes, but this one just seemed very Mary Poppins (aka “practically perfect in every way”) in it’s execution, so I didn’t really make many alterations. Probably my biggest “change” is that, if a recipe calls for any sort of dried fruit, I very rarely just use what they say. Instead, I keep a big jar of mixed dried fruit soaking in rum in my cupboard, and I pretty much always use that. It has never steered me wrong, and never fails to make everything just that little bit more delicious 🙂 .
The other upside to me shamelessly using someone else’s recipe with essentially zero changes is that this week, I don’t have to type out a recipe! Huzzah!
Yield: 3 small loaves
Used recipe from Seitan is my Motor – only changes I made were, as I said replacing the raisins with a mix of rum soaked dried fruit (figs, cherries, raisins, cranberries, apricots), and I used lemon zest instead of lemon oil.
I am so glad you liked this recipe! Your Stollen came out so beautifully and it looks amazingly light. How awesome that you always have some soaked dried fruit on hand! It’s funny, but I never thought of Stollen as being a fruit cake. In Germany the emphasis is always on the amount of fat used in these kind of recipes, and so it’s just labeled as a heavily enriched yeast baked good. Plus Stollen can be made without fruit (only marzipan or nut fillings are common as well). But of course you are right! Thanks for trying and sharing this.
by Mihl July 7, 2015 at 07 : 13Thanks for the recipe! It was amazingly easy and straightforward to make, so I think I’m definitely going to have add it in to my Christmas rotation.
by admin July 7, 2015 at 01 : 21