This is a famous recipe, and tricky to make, on account of
the large amounts of butter, raisins, almonds, etc – yeast prefers to work with
plain flour cakes. Nevertheless it is a
must for many German homes at Christmas time.
Lesser individuals buy it in shops, but yours truly prepares her own
most years. Partly because mine is
better than the shop bought variety, partly because it makes a very good
Christmas present!
There are any number of recipes, I am using an old one from
before the war (the Boer War, if you must know!), suitably adapted for my
situation and with a few personal improvements thrown in. I have taken lots of photos, so you can see
exactly what I am talking about.
My cookbook doesn’t give a proper list of ingredients at the
beginning, but I give a list here for your convenience.
2 kg Flour
200 gr Beer-yeast (I have never been able to track this
down, so use regular fresh or freeze dried yeast, a bit more than I would use
for making regular cakes or bread)
1 l Milk
400 gr Sugar
Zest/Peel of two Lemons (organic, ideally)1 Teaspoon Cardamon
¼ Teaspoon Macis
¼ Teaspoon Salt
400 gr Almonds & some bitter almond extract
500 gr Candied Citrus Peel
1 kg Raisins
300 gr Currants
900 gr Butter (plus some for basting later)
Liqueur?
Take the butter out of the fridge!
Get hold of the largest bowl in the house – it will need to
accommodate an awful lot of ingredients!
Put in the flour, put bowl with flour in a warm place.
Mix yeast with sugar and warm milk. Once the sugar is dissolved and the yeast
starts to bubble, make a dale in the flour in your bowl and pour the
milk/sugar/yeast mixture into it. Mix
some of the flour into the milk, just enough to make a thin slush – at this
stage you don’t want a proper dough, just a sloshy pre-dough. Put bowl in a warm place and cover with a
clean kitchen towel. Let the yeast grow
and expand – this will probably take an hour, but it depends on your yeast, the
temperature of your kitchen, how warm the milk was, etc etc. Play it by ear.
While the yeast is multiplying, you prepare the other
ingredients. Wet the raisins and
currants with the liqueur of your choice, maybe half a cup (optional). If you use too much liquid you may need to
add more flour later on.
The recipe calls for the almonds to be stripped naked, I never
do this, being a prude. The skins are
healthy roughage, and I am leaving them on.
I grind them together with the candied citrus peel, because if you have
proper citrus peel it will be sticky and grinding it with the almonds makes the
job less messy. In the past I always
used a mechanical grinder, and these work very well. Unfortunately I have some arthritis in my
hands, and am trying to cut down on repetitive jobs that strain my wrists, so
this year I bought a little electric grinder – a mini food processor, as they
are called. It worked very well, the
consistency of the almonds and candied peel is exactly the same as what the
hand grinder produced. Since the
electric grinder is quite small I had to grind several batches, but that is the
same with the hand grinder so no problem.
The butter needs to be soft, but not melted. Since you took it out of the fridge several
hours ago, it will be almost right by now.
Cut it into many small pieces into a bowl and stir it vigorously with a
spoon. If you can’t stir it the butter
needs to warm up a bit more.
Wash and scrub your lemons and scrape the zest off with a
grater. Only use the zest (yellow bit),
none of the white bit should be grated.
Now all your ingredients are ready, and it is time to check
on the pre-dough in the large bowl. If
it has expanded and is bubbling nicely, you can proceed to add the spices and
salt and lemon zest and knead it really really well.
The word ‘knead’ is probably derived from ‘kneel’, because
that is the best way to knead a dough like this one properly. Put the bowl on the floor, kneel in front of
it, and knead it until you have a nice round ball, neither sticking to your
hands nor bone dry. It should have the
consistency of bread dough. The kneading
should take about half an hour – put on the radio so you don’t get bored and
give up before the dough is properly done.
Now cover the dough in your bowl again with the towel and
let it rise again for a while, until you are satisfied that it has risen enough
to carry the weight of all those other ingredients. Keep in mind that the parts of the dough that
contain the yeast and will cause the cake to rise properly will be mixed with
lots of butter and raisins and almonds and peel, none of which will make the
cake rise. So if you don’t let the
starter dough rise long enough to gather its strength, as it were, it will have
no chance to rise once all the other ingredients have been added. Think of the other ingredients as burdens
which have to be carried – lifted up – by the yeast dough. If the yeast dough has not fermented properly
it could perhaps give a good risen cake by itself, but with all the other
ingredients added it will simply be overwhelmed and you will get a flat
cake. That is the reason why this is a
difficult cake to make – there are so many ingredients that can’t contribute to
the rising of the cake that it may remain flat.
Pre-heat oven to 200C (gas mark 6).
OK, now you have a good yeast dough, well leavened
throughout and ready to carry all those other ingredients through the baking
process. If you have a seriously large
bowl (like a washing up bowl), you can simply add all the ingredients not yet
used into the bowl. If you only have a
bowl which is too small for holding all the ingredients at once, you may want
to divide the dough into several pieces and knead it in batches. Being the proud owner of a huge monster bowl
I can do the mixing and kneading in one go.
I just throw all the remaining ingredients into my bowl, on top of my
yeast dough. Then I check my ingredients
list, making sure I have not left anything off.
Then I place the bowl on the floor again, kneel down in front of it in a
respectful manner, and knead and knead and knead. It will take another half hour or so. When you are satisfied with the result, cover
again with the towel and put into a warm place for another half hour or so. Once it has risen sufficiently, knead through
one last time and divide into pieces for baking, either on a cookie sheet or in
tins.
Stollen type cake has a typical shape, which is achieved as
follows. Form a 5 to 10 cm thick
rectangle from your dough and lay it onto a cookie-sheet so that 1/3rd
is laid on top of the remaining 2/3rds.
It will look like this:
__--- Sort of like a slope, a
rolling hill. Anyway, whenever I try to do
this the dough disobeys and I never get the typical stolen-shape but just a
formless slab. So I have given up and am
using normal baking tins instead. Since
I give most of my stollen away this works quite well – I can give away
individual little cakes rather than slabs of a cut up large cake.
The amount of dough this recipe yields was enough to fill
the following tins:
2 small round cake tins
2 medium round cake tins
2 medium rectangular cake tins
2 large rectangular cake tins.
I baked them in three batches. Use second grate from the bottom. It is inadvisable to put cake tins on more
than one grate, somehow they never bake evenly.
Even having more than one cake tin on the same grate affects how they
bake. My first batch included one large
and two small tins. After one hour one
of the small tins was done, but the other needed another 15 minutes. The bigger tin took an extra 15 minutes as
well. Put some aluminium foil over the
tins for the first 30 minutes or so of baking, to stop them from going brown at
the top too quickly. The baking time is
supposed to be 1 hour, but for me it is always at least 15 minutes longer. Keep checking by sticking a wooden toothpick
into the cake – if it comes out with no dough clinging to it the cake is done.
While the first batch of tins
bakes the next two batches sit around waiting and rising a little more. I see no harm in this.
When your cakes are done, let them
cool a little, then take them out of their tins and on to a rack. Anoint them with melted butter and add icing
sugar on top. If you make the cookie
sheet/rolling hill shape of stollen you can cover the whole thing in melted
butter and sugar, but if you use tins you can only do the top, so your cakes
will look less attractive (if you think a cake that looks like a ski-slope is
attractive, that is). So you could try
to cover your cake with a glaze or even a marzipan covering. Not authentic, but can be quite nice.
After the cakes have cooled down,
wrap in heavy duty aluminium foil and store in a cool dark dry place for at
least a week before eating. I have kept
some in the vegetable compartment of the fridge until Easter – this cake is a
keeper, unless it gets eaten too soon, of course.
Secrets of success? Use top grade ingredients, and be patient
when it comes to kneading and letting it rise.
The ingredients for this cake don’t come cheap, so you want to do everything
you can to make sure it is a success.
The whole process took me about seven hours, by the way, so
make this cake on the weekend when you can stay in all day.
