I have been inspired to write this post by Hanne from Norway, who writes about a cake she bought in Germany, called Christollen. She is enjoying the cake very much and she is asking for a recipe.
Stollen, as known here in England for short, is a festive German cake (some call it bread) and there are many regional recipes for it, some including marzipan. Although I come from the Central Europe myself, the first time I heard about stollen was in the house of our German friends living in London, many years ago. (The Czechs have "vanocka", which is similar to stollen, but shaped to a plat.)
My friend got her stollen directly from Germany. In those days you could get very little foreign foods here in England, as I already mentioned in my "bread" post. But that has all changed now, we can get a large variety of foreign foods and our good food shops are one of the best in Europe. This is of course due to our multicultural society, we all expect to be able to buy the food we like and the shops have responded to this demand very well.And so, we have been able to buy stollen, imported from Germany, for several years now. Some English bakeries have tried to make stollens to their own recipes, but there is no comparing, Germans do it best.
I must admit that I have never made a stollen myself. The German stollens we can buy here are very good, so there doesn't seem any point in making it myself.
I have my stollens, ready for Christmas.
The favourite one in our house is stollen with poppy seed filling, they are not so easy to get, but we make sure we "hunt it down" every year.
But back to Hanne's request. I have a recipe in one of my books and this is it. As I said before, I have never made one, but it might be worth trying it out if she wants to make one.
