Bread-machine "stollen"

[mme_hardy]

Note quotation marks. This isn't made by hand, and it doesn't have a marzipan filling. It is a very pleasant spice-and-fruit bread, and it's great for the days when you don't have the oomph to knead, rise, and shape by hand. This is originally from a King Arthur Flour recipe, but I've messed with it. I use different combinations of spices, flavorings, and especially fruits each time I make it. Sized for a Zojirushi bread machine, so look at the flour weight, look at the flour weight for the "basic bread" for your machine, and size up or down proportionally.

The note in my handwriting says I've been making this since January 1998, which was ... a long time ago. I count by my children, and my eldest was eight.

Put in bread machine, in order:

1 cup milk
1 egg
2 tablespoons of butter
3/4 tsp "Fiori di Sicilia", an Italian citrus-floral-vanilla blend; can substitute a good vanilla
2 tablespoons brown sugar
1.5 tsp salt
1/4 tsp lemon oil (this is lemon-skin essential oil, NOT lemon extract), optional
1/8 teaspoon mace, if you've got it, otherwise nutmeg
1/8 t ground cardamom, I often use 1/4 because I like cardamom
15 ounces /425 grams bread flour
2 tsp yeast, nestled into a pit in the top of the flour
1/2 cup mixed* candied/dried fruit, added at appropriate time in cycle for your machine.

* I use different fruit combinations based on the quality of the fruit available. Don't use the glunky corn-syrup-based mixed candied fruit if you can help it. This is good with minced dried apricot, with raisins, with slivered almonds, with good-quality candied peel, with whatever you've got that you approve of. The current batch has dried candied tangerines (Trader Joe's), "raspberry bits" (raspberry juice + pectin morsels; King Arthur Flour), a few dried apricots, good candied lemon peel, and chopped candied ginger. I always add chopped candied ginger to any mixed-dried-fruit thing I cook; it's a wonderful addition to mince pie, for instance.

If you make this by hand, double the recipe to get two loves [typo, but I'm keeping it.]. The bread machine, if you have one, lets you have the spicy yeasty smell of rising and baking bread with minimal effort, but the recipe also works superbly if you have the oomph to do it by hand.

Comments

[tavella.livejournal.com]

Hmm, I may have to try this! Thanks, I no longer have the patience to do breads by hand.