This is not my fruitcake. But it is pretty!
As you might have read below, I’ve always disliked stollen. It was too sweet, too rum-soaked, too almondy. But, I was determined to make something delicious and impress not only myself but the other non-stollen fans in my family.
I recently joined the Daring Bakers group and, lo and behold, my first challenge was to create stollen! Well, wasn’t that good fortune? The 2010 December Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Penny of Sweet Sadie’s Baking. She chose to challenge Daring Bakers’ to make Stollen. She adapted a friend’s family recipe and combined it with information from friends, techniques from Peter Reinhart’s book………and Martha Stewart’s demonstration.
Admittedly, I didn’t follow her recipe too strictly as I knew my family wouldn’t eat it. Besides, my grandparents had already purchased two traditional stollens, so a third was really quite unnecessary. After some searching, I decided to use the New York Times’s recipe for cranberry stollen for my foundation recipe.
Unfortunately, I don’t have a picture of the final product, but I’m trying to get one!
Here’s my adapted recipe (not terribly far off from the original, but you’ll notice the almonds are missing and that I halved it as I only needed to make one loaf).
- 1 package active dry yeast
- 1/4 cup warm water
- 1/4 cup unsalted butter, softened
- 1/4 cup sugar
- 1 egg, at room temperature
- 1 cup whole milk, warmed slightly
- 3-4 cups all-purpose flour
- 1 tsp kosher salt
- 1.5 tsp ground nutmeg
- 8oz. dried cranberries
My adapted directions:
1. Stir the yeast and water together and let stand until dissolved. Using an electric mixer, beat the butter until light. Beat in the sugar. Add egg. Mix well.
2. Stir the milk into the yeast mixture. Very slowly stir the yeast mixture into the butter mixture. Add 1/2 cup of flour, the salt and nutmeg and mix well. Stir in the cranberries.
3. Begin adding flour 1 cup at a time until the dough becomes too difficult to stir (for me, this took about 3 cups). Turn the dough out onto a floured surface and knead until smooth, adding enough additional flour to make a soft but not sticky dough.
Ooof. We've reached the "too difficult to mix" stage.
4. Butter a large bowl, shape the dough into a ball and place in the bowl. Cover with a kitchen towel and let stand in a warm place until doubled in bulk, about 2 to 2 1/2 hours. (Now, I ended up leaving the loaf to rest for about 5 hours as we all went out for Christmas Eve dinner. It was still perfectly puffy when I returned).
Shhh...it's resting.
5. Punch down the dough (Got holiday stress? Here’s your chance to let some of it out). Press the dough out with your hands into an oval shape about 12 inches long and 8 inches wide. Fold 1 of the long sides about two-thirds of the way over, overlap with the other side and press down firmly. (I basically just made a loaf.)
6. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Place the dough on a baking sheet. Cover with a towel and let rise for 45 minutes. Then, bake until it sounds hollow when tapped on the bottom, about 45 minutes (mine was more like 50-55 minutes). Cover with aluminum foil if breads brown too quickly. Cool on a rack.
Note: The 1/4 cup of water above is not actually a goof in my editing. It was a mistake in my baking. When I was mixing the yeast with the warm water and the milk, I forgot to halve the water. But, it didn’t hurt the final product. In fact, it probably made it more moist than it would have been!
The result? Delicious stollen. Or cranberry bread. I will definitely be making this again as even non-stollen fans thought it was yummy. Oddly, though, it still had a hint of a stollen-like taste. I can’t figure out why…can you?