a very vegan christmas: stollen

Stollen – a traditional German cake or bread first eaten at Christmastime in the Saxon Royal Court in the 15th century according to Wikipedia.  Originally it was more like pastry than bread or cake, pretty tasteless and bland as bakers weren’t allowed to use eggs, butter or sugar in their products during Advent.  Well over the years it’s turned into a sweet, sticky, marzipan-y lump of deliciousness and I for one am quite glad about it.

Having said that, the bakers in this house do not use eggs or butter.  Stollen as it is now is full of non-vegan stuff so I had to put my thinking cap on.  Butter and milk are easy to replace with their soy equivalents, but the egg?  I wasn’t sure what would work.  Banana was out – I didn’t want the stollen being overtaken by banana flavour – and I thought silken tofu would make the mixture a bit too wet.  So I took a risk and went with the flax egg.  Oh flax egg, you never let me down!

Every family makes their own traditions at Christmas and Himself and I have made it a tradition to spend an entire Saturday afternoon each year making stollen.  If you make it be prepared for it to take an afternoon.  Have DVDs, good books or a game of Killer Bunnies to hand for while you are waiting for it to rise.  Relish in the time, enjoy it!

You may remember how Himself’s clammy hands make for rather marvellous pastry.  Well they make for fantastic bread kneading skills too, much better than mine so I will leave you in his capable (if clammy) hands.

Warning: You may be tempted to do the kneading part of the recipe on the dough setting of a bread maker.  Don’t.  I don’t know why it doesn’t work, but it just doesn’t.  Give stollen the time and energy it deserves!

Over to Himself.

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I love stollen. Not only does it taste great, it’s also really fun to prepare. There’s a surprisingly large amount of ingredients that go into this but it’s actually a simple recipe. It’s one of those recipes that takes time, patience and a bit of love. When you’re kneading the dough for the lengthy 10 minutes, try not to think about all the other things you could be doing, just stay present and in the moment and think about how amazing this is going to taste when you’re done and what a reward for your efforts it will be.

Ingredients
75g/3oz raisins
75g/3oz sultanas
25g/1oz mixed peel
50g/2oz glace cherries (chopped)
50g/2oz ground almonds
Finely grated zest of 1 lemon
0.25 teaspoon nutmeg
0.5 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
375g/15oz plain flour
1 sachet dried yeast
50g/2oz sugar
1 flax egg
65g/2.5oz vegan margarine, melted
150ml/5 floz warm soy or rice milk
200g/8oz marzipan

(A note on Marzipan – we used Co-op prepackaged white marzipan.  This says “suitable for vegans” on the outside of the pack.  Check packs before you buy as some marzipan has eggs in.  Pa Yogini makes his own marzipan but it has an egg in.  We are working on a vegan version and hope to bring it to you soon!)

Take the cherries and chop them into quarters

Take a large bowl and mix in the mixed fruit, cherries, almonds, lemon zest, cinnamon, nutmeg and vanilla extract using a wooden spoon. Cover with cling film and leave to stand while you prepare the dough.

Grab another bowl and pour in the flour, yeast, sugar, flax egg, melted butter and milk. Mix it together with a round edged knife so it starts to form the basis of a dough. Then get your hands in there and finish it off. Dough is best when brutally treated so squish it, roll it, ball it, punch it and beat it with the rolling pin. You need to get all the air out and bond everything together so it doesn’t just fall apart when it rises. You should spend about 10 minutes kneading the dough to give you a really lovely texture once cooked.

If you do find that you drop it in the sink full of water because you were arsing around, just grab some flour and rub it in until it dries up. When you’re done, you should have a nice and stretchy elastic dough that you can pull apart quite a bit without it tearing.  (Dear God in Heaven…. Just as well we’re not selling this stuff, we’d be shut down by Health & Safety – R)

Lightly oil the bowl and drop the dough in, cover  with cling film and leave to rise for about 75 minutes in a warm place. Under a table lamp is usually good. It should rise to about 2.5 times the size.

Once the dough has risen, take it out and place it on a lightly floured surface. Take the fruit in handfuls and knead in to the dough.

You’ll probably find the dough can only take so much fruit before it starts rejecting it. This is quite a messy process so don’t worry if you think it’s going wrong!

When you can squish in no more fruit, cover it with towel and leave to rise for another 20-25 minutes.

Traditionally stollen comes in loaf form. It’s essentially a bread rather than a cake so it makes sense. However, the last couple of years has seen an increase in stollen slices, stollen bites etc being sold in the supermarket, so this year we decided to do something different and make stollen muffins.

Roll the fruit dough into a fairly large tube then cut it into 12 even pieces. Take each piece and roll it in your hands. It should be quite sticky now. Make a thumbprint in the middle, add a ball of marzipan (about 2cm round) to the imprint and roll the dough around it.

Repeat for each ball and when done, pop them in some muffin cases in a tray and cover with cling film.

Turn the oven onto 190*C/375*F/gas mark 5 to preheat.

Leave the dough balls to rise again for another 20 minutes under the lamp then pop them in the oven and bake for 20 minutes or until golden.

If you make them early, you can freeze them for a couple of weeks and take them out to defrost on Christmas Eve. They make a wonderful Christmas Day breakfast accompaniment.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 1st, 2010 at 9:17 am and is filed under recipes of the week, very vegan christmas. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.