ABC - Perfect Christmas Stollen

This month's recipe concludes our ABC baking for 2016, and with that, baking from the Weekend Bakery blog. So we went out with a bang: Perfect Christmas Stollen. Soft citrus-y yeast bread, chock full of dried fruit, wrapped around a log of lemon flavored homemade almond paste. What's not to like?

If you'd like to join the ABC bakers in their monthly baking adventures, please go to the ABC blog for more information.


Step-by-step pictures:

Left: "sweetener" which is a mixture of citrus zest rubbed in sugar
Right: homemade almond paste before adding the egg yolk (so easy and yummy and cheaper than store bought)

Used the Dough cycle in my bread machine to make the dough

Dried fruit: craisins, sultanas, and golden raisins (I skipped the soaking)

Doubled in volume and ready for the oven

Golden brown and delicious after a 25 min trip to the oven

A slice of yummy goodness. Bon Appetit!

Final thoughts/tips:

• I had made this recipe before but had skipped the almond paste. This time around the almond paste was included and boy, was that that yummy!
• The soft and fluffy texture of the bread was really nice. The dried fruit provided a nice texture change as well as flavor. The almond paste was pretty soft and didn't keep its round shape inside the bread. Maybe not as cosmetically appealing but it was really nice to "shmear" onto the slice of bread itself.
• Hubby hasn't had a chance to try this yet. I have sliced the bread and frozen it. Will update this blog post with his rating once he tastes it.
• 1/8/2017: hubby tasted it and liked the citrus flavors and the dried fruit. He gave it an 8.5 out of 10 rating!
• The recipe didn't require a lot of changes. I'll add my adaptation of it to the bottom of this blog post.
• Please check out what the other ABC bakers thought of this recipe, either on the ABC blog or on Facebook.

Perfect Christmas Stollen

(adapted from the Weekend Bakery blog)

Ingredients:

• 250 gr bleached AP flour
• 135 gr milk
• 25 gr water (my addition)
• 7 gr instant yeast (will use 5 gr next time)
• 5 gr salt
• 1 egg yolk
• 25 gr salted butter, softened
• 15 gr vegetable oil
• 15 gr "sweetener"
• 180 gr dried fruit (100 gr craisins, 40 gr sultanas, 40 gr golden raisins)
• 150 gr almond paste, mixed with 1 egg yolk (will use 1/2 egg yolk next time)

Sweetener = 45 gr sugar + zest of 1 lemon + zest of 1 orange. Mix together and use 15 gr for the recipe. Store the rest in the fridge.

Almond paste (used 1/3 of the recipe to get ~150 gr of almond paste):

• 83 gr almond flour (blanched)
• 83 gr sugar
• 15 gr water
• zest of a 1/3 lemon (I just used a little bit of the sweetener)

Instructions:

Just follow the instructions on the Weekend Bakery blog. I used the bread machine for the dough (you don't have to) and manually folded in the dried fruit.

Here's a video on how to easily fold dried fruit into your dough. Start watching at 1min15sec: