Time has no meaning

Or at least it's felt that way for the last year or so. But for once, I'm using that to my advantage. I'm declaring that it's still Christmas, so I'm baking stollen! I've tried doing stollen once before, many years ago, and while it wasn't bad, I remembered thinking that it was a bit dry. So I'm going to try a new recipe this time around. It's fundamentally cribbed from this one from the Guardian (which actually seems to have been published again), but also with some elements nabbed from this recipe too.

Marzipan Stollen Take Two

Ingredients

• 160ml Milk
• 1 sachet Yeast
• 80g Mixed peel
• 150g Raisins
• 50ml Kirsch
• 425g Plain flour
• 50g Caster sugar
• 7g (1tsp) Salt
• 1 Egg
• 1tbsp Vanilla extract
• 150g Butter
• 40g Blanched almonds
• 320g Marzipan
• Icing sugar

Method

1. Warm the milk to ~40C and whisk in the yeast, a tablespoon of flour and a teaspoon of sugar. Cover and leave for a couple of hours.
2. Mix the mixed peel, raisins and kirsch together. Leave to absorb.
3. Mix the flour, sugar and salt together in a mixing bowl.
4. Mix in the egg, vanilla and yeast mixture.
5. Melt the butter and incorporate into the flour mixture to form a dough.
6. Knead for ~10 mins.
7. Return to mixing bowl, wrap in a bin liner and leave to rise for ~2 hours.
8. Chop the almonds.
9. Knead the dough, add the fruit and almonds and knead to distribute.
10. Shape dough and fold over the slab of marzipan.
11. Place on baking tray, return to bin liner and leave to prove for ~3 hours.
12. Bake at 180C for ~50 mins until internal temperature is 90C.
13. Brush with melted butter and dust heavily with icing sugar.
14. Repeat step 13.
15. Leave to cool fully.

No, the amount of marzipan isn't a typo - I'm always disappointed by how little marzipan there is in when I get a slice of stollen. I also significantly bumped up the amount of fruit and nuts, because, well, why not?

Here it is at the end of step 11, just before the final proof.

And ready for the oven. I'd have liked a little bit more of a rise, but it already had 3 hours of proving, and I didn't want it to get too late before it came out of the oven.

Fresh from the oven. It got a little bit darker than I would have liked - I did end up turning the oven down to 160C for the last part.

Without any exaggeration, I think that this might possibly be the most unhealthy thing I've ever made. The topping means that there's pretty much an entire block of butter in this one stollen, and there's really quite a lot of icing sugar added as well (the recipe did say to dust heavily...). And on top of that, remember that there's three quarters of a packet of marzipan in there for good measure. It does look good though!

This one was far better than the first time I tried making stollen - the huge amount of butter made a real difference to how moist it was, and the ridiculous butter-sugar-butter-sugar coating really makes it special in my opinion (I've seen some recipes say that you should go for three or even four coats!). But I'm also glad that I managed to pass on just over half of the stollen to friends - I think Fiona and I might have ended up with heart attacks if we'd eaten it all ourselves! This definitely needs to be a (very) occasional treat, but it's well worth the effort I think!