2011 version of Oma Kaethe's Stollen recipe from1980

What is a Christmas Stollen?

Germany’s age old answer to the American Fruit Cake is documented as far back as 1329 and is said to originate from the “Christbrot”, an Advent time fasting supplement for monks consisting of flour, yeast and water. The later addition of all the extra goodies as ingredients make them, to this day, very popular among the people with German roots all over the world.

As the Christmas tree was not decorated during my childhood years in our house till Christmas Eve and the only earlier reminder of Christmas approaching was the Advent wreath, you still knew that the Holiday was around the corner when the ingredients for cookies started to invade our kitchen. This event culminated with the annual preparation of the Christmas Stollen.

1980 stollen recipe page from the old cookbook

While translating Oma Kaethe’s cookbook we found 16 documentations of ingredients dating as far back as 1941 and up to 1980. As the ingredients were always the same, the interesting part was that in the earlier lists the amounts greatly differed from year to year. This was actually a history lesson, as you could follow exactly what was available during and after World War II.  One year you had a shortage of almonds, the next raisins and another year even the candied fruits were in short supply.

The size of the recipes were huge with a minimum of 12 pounds of flour and up to 24 pounds. 24 pounds with all the extra ingredients yields about 12 – 4 pound Stollen or 32 normal size 1 1/2 pounders.

In our house in Bavaria the ingredients were mixed and prepared and the end result was brought to one of the local bakers for baking, with us kids tagging along having the annual territorial snowball fight outside the bakery against the kids living around there.

Nowadays our relatives in Germany do not go through the work of baking their own Stollen anymore as over 30 years ago this baker asked for and was given our recipe. His yearly Stollen production is a popular Christmas addition in many of the local homes. Even during the years my mother spent Christmas in Germany she still baked the cookies and sent care packages to us during Advent which included a Stollen from that baker.

During the years running our meat market one of the bakeries supplying us with bread and hard rolls asked us for a Stollen recipe. This same Stollen was produced in his bakery from then on, until his retirement. With both of our “suppliers” now gone it is back to baking our own again, as most of the commercially baked varieties are okay for the occasion, but are not quite up there, in our opinion.

A link to the recipe of what we think is one of the top quality Stollen around will be added here once all the pictures are ready and the recipe is added to ingeskitchen.com. Below is already the ingredients list of it:

12 lbs Flour
4 lbs melted Butter
2½ lbs Sugar
4 lbs light & dark Raisins
4½ lbs Almonds
3 lbs Citron
½ lb Candied Orange Peel
10 Vanilla Sugar         6 Lemons, zest of
60 g Bitter Almonds or 9 Bitter Almond oil (Oetker)
1 bottle Rum & Arrack mixed to total ¾ liter
850 g Yeast
2 whole Eggs
15 Egg Yolks
50 g Salt
2½ l Milk