Paul Hollywood may have inspired us to bake stollen, but his recipe is very faffy, so we’re going with the far less complicated version in Dan Lepard’s Short & Sweet book (p94).

• 350g white bread flour
• 25g white bread flour
• 75g caster sugar
• 3/4 tsp salt
• 1 tsp ground cardamon
• 1 tsp ground nutmeg
• 1 tsp ground cinnamon
• 50g ground almonds
• 200g mixed dried fruit
• 150ml milk
• 125g unsalted butter
• 1 medium egg
• 2 egg yolks
• 2 tbsp dark rum
• zest of a lemon
• 250g marzipan

The marzipan was the same we used for the mince pies and cookies. The “200g mixed dried fruit” actually turned into me using up whatever bits and bobs we had open, and includes candied peel, glacier cherries, raisins, crystallised ginger and walnuts.

The 350g flour gets mixed with sugar, salt, spices, almonds and fruit. The recipe says to add the yeast now, but I didn’t want the salt retarding the yeast while it sat around.

The milk, 25g flour got heated on the hob, then the butter melted into it, and thickened while whisking for about 10 minutes into a glossy paste. After cooling the eggs, rum and lemon zest get whisked in.

The two bowls of mixtures then get mixed together, along with the yeast, in the mixer using the K paddle. This then stands for 10 minutes before it gets kneaded with the bread hook until it starts to form gluten: only about 5 minutes, not the full bread knead.

This then goes off to prove for 2 hours.

It then gets rolled out into a rectangle, a layer of marzipan placed over half of it, then it gets folded over and pressed down at the edges to seal it.

After sitting to rise for another 2 hours it’s into a 180c fan oven for 35 minutes.

After it cools a bit, but while still warm, it gets brushed with butter to seal it, then sprinkled with icing sugar.

Now apparently we’re supposed to leave it for a couple of days to let it improve before we eat it. Hmm… we’ll see about that!

UPDATE!

We survived for ages: all the way to Christmas day in fact, then had it for breakfast :) As you can see it’s a little bit underdone in the middle below the marzipan layer, but it still tastes great. In fact the extra stodginess is actually kinda nice – certainly better than overdone.