Daring Bakers - Christmas Stollen

Been gone for a while for Christmas vacations, hence the lack of posting. Hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas with wonderful food of course :)

This month challenge in the Daring Bakers was really on the spot, since i wanted to try to make a Stollen, the typical German Christmas bread with fruit and nuts. The recipe makes for a quite big stollen, or actually more than one. In my case the dough came out a bit dry, I would probably bake it for less time or add a little bit less flour if I do this recipe again. Otherwise the taste was fabulous, though I must agree it is not quite the typical recipe ;)

In my case I substituted the raisins by cranberries, since most of the people who were going to eat it don´t like raisins that much.

This bread reminds me a lot of the portuguese "Bolo Rei" also typical for this season.

The 2010 December Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Penny of Sweet Sadie’s Baking. She chose to challenge Daring Bakers’ to make Stollen. She adapted a friend’s family recipe and combined it with information from friends, techniques from Peter Reinhart’s book.........and Martha Stewart’s demonstration.

If you want, you can check out the recipe in the Daring Kitchen.

Apple and cinnamon rolls

I took pieces and bits from other recipes until I got what I wanted...
For the filling I took inspiration in a German cooking magazine, though I changed it a little bit and added a bit of rum.

Apple and cinnamon rolls



For the dough
500 gr flour
50 gr sugar
80 gr unsalted butter melted and cooled down
250 mL of lukewarm milk
1 medium egg
1 package of instant dry yeast (or the equivalent for the amount of flour used)
a pinch of salt

For the filling
2 apples chopped in small cubes
2 tablespoons of grounded cinnamon
1 tablespoon of rum
3 tablespoons of unsalted butter melted
3 tablespoons of brown sugar


Preparing the dough:

In a bowl mix the flour, salt and sugar. Dissolve the yeast in the warm milk. Add all together the beaten egg, melted butter and milk/yeast mixture to the flour. Mix well until the dough is fully hydrated. Knead the dough for some minutes until is homogeneous. Placed in a slightly greased bowl and cover, leaving to rise for until it doubles its size.
Roll the dough in a rectangular shape until it is around 1 centimeter thick.
Pre-heat the oven to 180°C.

Preparing the filling:

In a bowl, mix the butter, sugar, cinnamon, rum and chopped apples. Let it cool down totally.
Spread the mixture evenly over the dough.

Preparing the rolls:

Roll the dough from the largest side, pressing gently along the way.
Cut the roll in 5 cm pieces, and placed them in a greased backing tray, with around 1 cm distance between each other. Leave to rise one last time for about 20 minutes.
Bake the rolls for 10 minutes or until slightly golden on top.

And enjoy!