CHRISTMAS STOLLEN
(CHRISTSTOLLEN)

Recipe for one piece of stollen (I usually bake from double dosage and stollens are eaten very quickly)... Stollen is very "intensive" kind of Christmas sweet bread prepared traditionally in Central Europe... Stollen should be baked 2-3 weeks before Christmas and then let "relaxed"... Once, my husband suggested to try the warm fresh stollen... And until that time, we eat it right after baking... Many other Christmas sweets are baked until Christmas, so stollen enjoys it's moment of deserved glory...

Ingredients:
600 gr of semi-grounded flour, 6 egg yolks, teaspoon of : salt, melted nutmeg, grated lemon zest, 80 gr of sugar, 200 gr of raisins dipped in rum (a lot of rum :)), 300 gr of peeled almonds, 200gr of grated almonds, 10 gr of halved almonds, 250 gr of melted butter, 3/4 of small yeast package, 200ml of milk...

Process:
Crumble yeast into warm milk, add teaspoon of sugar and flour, mix it.. Put it to warm place and wait until leaven arises...
Take a big bowl - and put in: flour, sugar, salt, nutmeg, lemonzest - and mix everything together... Then add leaven (use the milk for leaven upon the leaven's need, not all the milk will be necessary)... add yolks... and prepare smooth dough... during the process add also raisins with rum and almonds... put flour on the top, cover the dough with dishtowel and let the dough rise at warm place...

When the dought has arosen enough... put it on the desk covered with flour and by hands prepare "loaf", fold it over once and put to the baking plate... coat the loaf wiht milk and put halved almonds on the top... Bake it for 40 minutes at 180 degrees of Celsius... But keep checking it... I do the baking this way: After 10 minutes, I put aluminium foil over the loaf (not to get burned)... When you prick the loaf, it can't be sticky... When it is not sticky anymore - I put foil away and let the stollen get the perfect golden crust...

After taking stollen out of the oven... put melted butter on it and put a lot of powder sugar over it...

And BTW... use eggwhites to prepare Pavlova cake... or prepare small merengues from the same recipe as Pavlova cake...