Stollen

For our family's "Mazel Tov," I decided to bake something new and not overly sweet. I found a recipe for stollen and baked it yesterday... and it is so delicious! The recipe may seem complicated, but apart from the long list of ingredients, there is really nothing difficult about it :)

Finely chop the candied citrus peel. Soak the chopped, lightly toasted almonds and the raisins in cognac, either overnight or, as I did, for a couple of hours.

For the dough, grate the butter (I used pareve margarine) into the flour using a coarse grater. Add a pinch of salt, 150 g of sugar and 80 g of yeast (you can use less, 60 g).

For the milk—regular, almond, rice, and so on and so forth—mix 5 tablespoons of warm milk with 1 tablespoon of sugar, and set aside another 100 ml of milk for the dough, also warm.

The most important thing is the seasonings—cardamom, very, very little cinnamon, vanilla and lemon zest.

Mix everything together and roll it out. Once the dough is ready, add the raisins, almonds and candied peel. If the dough is a little dry, add the remaining cognac (I added a little Alpro milk).

Knead the dough well and let it rest under a towel for 30-40 minutes.

This amount of ingredients makes a lot of dough, so I divided it into 2 stollen loaves and folded them as shown in the pictures.

I baked them for 45 minutes, reducing the temperature along the way—for the first 15 minutes at 190 °C, then I lowered it to 180 °C.

When you take the finished stollen out of the oven, carefully dust it with powdered sugar and leave it under a towel overnight (I put it back in the cooled oven). By the way, stollen keeps for a long time and does not need refrigeration!

Enjoy, everyone!