A Christmas adventure!

We have a winter storm that "stalled" over the eastern part of Cincinnati last night and the early part of this morning dropping 4 1/2 inches of snow.  My husband took our truck, leaving the little Toyota Corolla which doesn't like it when it rains (don't even want to think what it would do in the snow!).  This is the perfect day to experiment.  So thanks to my good friend OldCampCook from Oklahoma who sent me a Stollen recipe to play with.  According to OldCampCook, Stollen is a German Fruit Cake.  I bought the ingredients last week in anticipation of a snow day (didn't think God would send one so fast!). The only ingredients that you might have to buy are fruit cake mix (candied fruit), sliced or chopped almonds, golden raisins, and instant dry yeast.  I will not post the recipe here since this is Bob's recipe.  It is listed on his web site - www.allthingsbread.bravehost.com  It is listed under Holiday Stollen.

It is a very easy recipe to make.  The kneading takes up most of the time.  The fruit, raisins and almonds are added last and kneaded into the dough.  The dough looks so pretty with all the candied fruit and golden raisins.  You let the dough rise twice.  The second time is after you have divided the dough in half and created the two braided loaves. 

The loaves bake for about 45 minutes and are dusted heavily with powdered sugar after you take them out of the oven.  I think it looks more like a festive coffee cake than a fruit cake.  I probably should have taken a picture of the loaves before we dusted them with the powdered sugar so you could see how pretty the braiding looks.  Anyway, this is definitely a keeper recipe!  One of the loaves is already half eaten!