I made a stollen this morning. Or at least, I started making it this morning and finally pulled it from the oven two minutes into the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols. I haven't done a Christmas cake this year. They aren't the easiest thing in the Aga, though after two successive years of burnt offerings and messing around ineffectually with brown paper tied around the tin I discovered that the answer was to move the cake after the first half hour to the simmer oven, and leave it there for longer than you would believe a fruit cake could be cooked for. I am quite fond of traditional Christmas cake, but they are pretty solid objects when there are only two of you, and I wasn't sure I wanted it lingering into next week and beyond when I might have had enough of eating and be starting to think about fitting back into my jeans.
The stollen is smaller and lighter, and if we don't eat it up fairly rapidly it will solve the leftovers problem for us by going mouldy. I followed the recipe in Andrew Whitley's book Bread Matters. To hear him talk about the Chorleywood bread process you would think that supermarket sliced was only marginally less dangerous than heroin, but his recipes have been reliable, those that I've tried. I had a go at his stollen once before, though I think I turned to the wrong page of the book for one part of the recipe and ended up with a hybrid. It seemed fine anyway.
His stollen recipe uses a sweet festive bread dough which is made in two stages, starting with a ferment, that is some flour, milk, sugar and yeast that's left to activate itself until it's flopped back down again. I was so keen to get the process moving along, I put the ferment on to start fermenting before I even ate my porridge, and it was only when I came to mix the ferment into the main dough that I realised I should have put the dried fruit to soak with the brandy or fruit juice several hours previously, or better still the night before. Ah well, tough. I put them to soak in plate warming oven, thinking that a bit of heat would speed things along.
The main dough uses more flour, the ferment, an egg and some butter, and does the magical thing that dough does of transforming itself during kneading from a sticky mess to something that feels quite smooth. Both the ferment and the proving took longer than the one hour each that Andrew Whitely says. I don't know why my bread keeps taking longer than it should. I've bought a new pack of yeast and the kitchen is pleasantly warm. There again, the book said to use 10 grammes of fresh yeast, but I didn't have any fresh (I never do) and used a teaspoon of dried, so once I'd altered the type and quantity of raising agent Andrew Whitley could quite reasonably say that all bets on timings were off.
It rose eventually, and by lunchtime was ready to go to the next stage, so I ate my lunch while staring suspiciously at the bowl by the Aga in case the cushion of dough suddenly collapsed. You mix the fruit into the dough, roll out some marzipan (which I bought. Grinding my own almonds felt like a step too far), pull the dough out until it is slightly larger than the marzipan, put the paste on the dough, roll it up like a Swiss roll, and brush it generously with beaten egg (which feels like the waste of most of an egg but hey, it's Christmas). Then it has to be left to prove again, though the book does not say for how long or what it should look like when it has finished, and finally cooked at 180 Celsius for half an hour or a shade longer. When it comes out of the oven it receives a final coating of melted butter, and once cooled a dusting of icing sugar, which will have to be repeated each time it is served, if you want it to look dusted. Apparently the everlasting icing sugar on the shop bought stollen is fortified with 'strange additives'.
I have now eaten a piece with most of a cup of tea (the rest of it got tipped over the baking book and my tablet in an altercation with Our Ginger) and it is very nice, with one criticism. If you roll up a soft yeast dough containing a generous quantity of dried fruit, some of the sultanas and raisins come to the surface. I was fairly sure that they were going to catch if cooked for as long as half an hour at 180 C, and they did. I picked the worst ones off, and you couldn't see the scars under the icing sugar, but it seems a design flaw. Would it be better to sprinkle the fruit over the marzipan and roll it into the loaf? It would form a discrete layer more like a Chelsea bun, but would be encased and wouldn't burn. Or should I have reduced the cooking time by a couple of minutes? The dough needs to be cooked through, otherwise it would be horrid. Ah well, I don't think I'll be auditioning for the Great British Bake Off just yet.
Addendum The electric rat zapper in the greenhouse caught another mouse last night. The mice in the Systems Administrator's blue summerhouse have eaten three pots of model paint, the white, the dark and the light blue. They have also chewed holes in about ninety out of a bag of a hundred empty pipettes. Why? And goodness knows what happens to barn owls that eat mice that have been eating plastic paint pots and blue paint.
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