Martha Stewart's big Big BIG Christmas Stollen
A holiday memory
I’m a longtime home-baker and solopreneur (doing business as The Electronic Cottage since 1989), so one holiday season I decided to bake gifts for my favorite clients.
But what could I make that was distinctive, impressive - and not fruitcake?
Martha Stewart to the rescue!
Years before Martha teamed up with Snoop Dogg (check out their mugs on various labels of 19 Crimes wine - sold at Sam’s Club, even) she was the doyenne of All Things Beautiful.
Martha had a long-running TV show, various style-related books with herself posing on the cover, and a magazine with her name in the title: Martha Stewart Living. She even had her own line of bedding at KMart - back when that discount chain was still in operation and not entirely a punchline.
So one afternoon I was sitting on the floor watching Martha on TV when she said that the project for that day was homemade Christmas stollen.
Known in Germany as Weihnachtsstollen, this delicious yeast bread is traditionally chock-full of candied fruit, raisins, and sometimes marzipan. It’s also nothing like the brick fruitcakes that have become a holiday joke for nearly everyone.
I thought a beautiful raised stollen dusted with powdered sugar would be the perfect gift for my customers.
Just as I started to run for a pen and paper to capture her recipe, Martha said to me (through the camera) that there was no need to write it down. The recipe was in that month’s issue of her magazine.
This bit of self-promotion worked. My wife subscribed (somewhat ironically) and I knew right where her stack of issues sat on the coffee table. So I settled back to take in the process without paying very much attention to the ingredients.
But when Martha mentioned that it took 3 ounces of yeast, I sat bolt upright. “That seems like a LOT of yeast,” I said to myself. “But she is the doyenne, after all.” (That French word and the very American Ms. Stewart are wedded together in my mind, so please forgive the repetition.)
That week I shopped for the ingredients, minus the marzipan; my wife can’t stand the stuff, and if we were going to have a stollen for ourselves, almond paste wasn’t going to come within a mile of our kitchen.
Buying the yeast gave me pause, however. A packet contains one-quarter ounce of yeast, so I would need (counting on fingers) 12 packets, according to the magazine.
Into the cart they went, along with candied fruit, raisins and currants.
But when it came time to make the thing itself, I hesitated. Opening packet after packet, it just seemed extremely excessive. I stopped at nine packets and put aside the rest for my next batches of bread.
The mixture of yeast, water and sugar proofed up like nothing I’d ever seen in all my years of baking. But there it was, in print. I needed to follow Martha’s recipe, since I’d never tried this kind of treat before.
After putting it all together, the stollen rose over the next hour. And rose. And rose some more. I punched it down, and it rose again. After punching it down once again, in a scene that might have come directly from an “I Love Lucy” episode, I formed it into a few of the oval yule-log shapes that people from Dresden have been making for ages.
Once again, the yeasty things rose beyond belief as the oven heated up.
My stollen baked up nicely, though the raisins, currants and candied fruit seemed to be distributed throughout the loaves much less densely than expected.
Still, Martha was the expert, so I finished them off with an enormous amount of powdered sugar and delivered one humongous loaf to my favorite customers, keeping the other for ourselves.
We thought it was quite nice (especially toasted) and at that size, it lasted a good long time. Clients Wayne and Janelle thanked me politely and together we went on to produce more projects in the new year.
My holiday gift had done its job.
Months later, I read a small notice in a spring issue of Martha Stewart Living. It was a correction.
As I remember it, the note said that in the recipe for Christmas stollen, the amount of yeast should have been three teaspoons, not three ounces.
I had used nine times the amount called for!
So thanks to Martha Stewart, I had baked the biggest Weihnachtsstollen I’ve ever seen … and got a story to tell every Christmas.
You might say that it was indeed a story of stollen valor.
I’ve never made stollen again, but if readers are curious, this recipe from Daring Gourmet looks excellent and provides much historical detail.