German Christmas Stollen

One of the best things about Christmas is that they have a lot of nice things you can eat here in Germany. Like the "Christstollen". It's a fruit cake with raisins, candied fruits and yeast and like in this case with almond paste.

This is the recipe from about.com:

Ingredients (dough): One vanilla bean, 1 kg flour, 100 g yeast [or 2 teaspoons activated yeast], 400 ml milk, 100 g sugar, 2 eggs, grated peel of one lemon, 1 teaspoon salt, 400 g butter, 200 g flour, 350 g raisins, 100 g shelled almonds, 50 g candied lemon peel, 100 g candied orange peel, 5 cl rum, almond paste

Ingredients (icing): 150 g butter, 1 vanilla bean, 100 g icing sugar.

1. Soak the raisins, almonds, candied lemon and orange peel in the rum. Mix a pre-dough out of 1 kg flour, 150 ml milk, a pinch of salt and yeast. Let rise. Mix the sugar with the pulp from the vanilla bean. Mix half of the vanilla sugar, the rest of the milk, eggs, lemon peel and salt into a dough and knead. Let rise for 30 minutes. Knead butter into 200 g flour and work into the yeast dough. Let rise for 15 minutes.

2. Form 2 rolls (30 cm long) and put some of the almond paste in the center, pound into stollen loaves. Place on a greased baking sheet, let rise for one hour. Bake at 200° C for about an hour. 

3. Coat with melted butter, cut the vanilla bean in half lengthwise. Scrape out the seeds with your knife and mix with the icing sugar, sprinkle over the stollen.

Enjoy!

Kram,

Isabell