Christmas demands either a fruit bread or fruit cake. The British have Christmas cake: dark, dense, and capped with a layer of fondant so hard and dusty it'll break your teeth. The Scottish can lay claim to Dundee cake, much lighter in a certain sense than Christmas cake and decorated with artfully-arranged whole blanched almonds. The Italians have panettone, of course, while the Norwegians and Danes have something similar called julekake, distinguished by the hit of cardamom. In the Netherlands, you'll find kerststol, comparable outwardly and inwardly to the subject of this week's post, Stollen. Now, the Austrians have their own Christmas loaf, the Kletzenbrot, which I wrote about a couple of weeks ago, and panettone is sort of ubiquitous here too at this time of year. But Stollen -- born in the fifteenth century -- is kind of a pan-Germanic Christmas staple whose origins are not Austrian but Saxon.
Also sold as Weihnachtsstollen or Christstollen at this time of year, Stollen shares certain characteristics with many other European Christmas fruit cakes and breads. A typical loaf will contain raisins (or perhaps sultanas), candied orange peel, candied lemon peel, chopped almonds, and spices like but not necessarily all of cinnamon, nutmeg, and cardamom. All these ingredients are worked into and through a yeasted bread dough enriched with butter and vanilla. What elevates Stollen -- at least in the eyes of those that love this ingredient -- is that some loaves will also contain a large quantity of marzipan, a block of which is shaped into a log and then enveloped by the bread dough, such that when it is baked, the Stollen has a central trunk of almond paste running from end to end of the loaf. The Stollen's snow white appearance comes from a thick coating of powdered sugar.
