(The 2010 December Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Penny of Sweet Sadie’s Baking. She chose to challenge Daring Bakers’ to make Stollen. She adapted a friend’s family recipe and combined it with information from friends, techniques from Peter Reinhart’s book………and Martha Stewart’s demonstration.)

My grandmother was from Pennsylvania, and I remember her always bringing stollen for the holidays.  I’ve been talking about trying one for a few years now, but I always spend my days before Christmas frantically making chocolate.  This year, instead of chocolate gifts, I made jams.  The jams were done in advance, so I had plenty of time this year.

It wasn’t a difficult bread – it actually reminded me a lot of a cinnamon-raisin challah that a local bakery makes.  Just a basic egg yeast bread, slow-risen, with fruit.  I used candied peel and cherries from the grocery store, and raisins that were rehydrated in orange juice. 

Mixed and in my bread-rising-bowl, it looked like this:

I let it rise, then rolled it out into a big square.  It was almost too big for my silicone rolling mat:

I rolled it up from the long side, then formed it into a round.  I tucked one side inside the other, then "glued" them together with a tiny bit of egg wash.

I snipped around the outside, let it rise one more time, then baked.

Have a close-up:

It was very good. I remember my grandmother’s having more fruit in it, and a glaze on top.  Next year, I’ll make my own candied zest, which should make it a bit more citrus-y, and add another kind of fruit besides the raisins and a few candied cherries. And maybe I’ll replace the powdered sugar with a citrus based glaze, with more fruit on top for decoration.  But those are all just tweaks – it really was quite good just the way it was.

( see the recipe )

I had people over for Christmas treats last weekend, and my next few posts are going to be about all the cookies and pies I made. 

Today, though, is about fruitcake.

I make fruitcake every year, using the Good Eats Free Range Fruitcake recipe.  It’s really very good, but it’s a little alcoholic for my friends with kids, and sometimes it just doesn’t feel like fruitcake without terrifyingly-red candied cherries:

But I’m also not a fan of fruitcakes that contain nothing but raisins and Scary Candied Fruit.  So I was going to skip making fruitcake altogether this year.  Then I saw this Chocolate Cherry Fruitcake from King Arthur.  It looked like the solution to all my issues – it had real fruit and nuts, it had candied cherries, and who can complain about the addition of chocolate?  My only worry was the "Jammy Bits", but they had a free-shipping special, and I figured it was worth a try.

When I got the box, they turned out to be just like little tiny fruit-flavored gumdrops.  I have a good recipe for fruit-flavored gumdrops, so next time I’ll just make my own. 

The fruitcake went together easy enough.  It said to soak the dried cherries in brandy, rum, or water, but apple cider would have worked just as well and added more flavor then water.  Once the dried cherries were soaked, the rest of the batter ingredients went in the stand mixer – butter, sugar, baking powder, salt, and vanilla and almond extract first, then 3 eggs. 

Then the flour got mixed in, alternating with the milk.  Once the batter was done, I mixed in the fruit, nuts, and chocolate by hand.  I’ve had trouble in the past with the mixer being too violent and breaking up chocolate chips, and I wanted them whole.

I used two baking pans – a 8×4 and a 10xsomething loaf pan, because that’s what I had.  They both took about the same time to bake – just over an hour.

I had some trouble getting them out of the pans – next time I’ll line them with parchment paper, at least on the bottoms, to make it easier.

Once they were cool, I brushed them with simple syrup (one part water, one part sugar, cook until the sugar is dissolved, then cool).  I brushed them with one more coat just before serving.

I was impressed.  The chocolate made it different enough to be interesting, and I thought the ratio of real fruit to candied fruit was just right.  It had just enough batter to hold all the fruit together.  I had been tempted to toss some cinnamon in the batter, but it didn’t need it – the fruit carried it just fine on it’s own.

I’ll make it again. Next time, in the little paper pans so I can give them out as last-minute gifts.  Because fruitcake doesn’t have to be awful!

( see the recipe )

This may be the silliest recipe I’ve ever posted.

I saw it on Tasty Kitchen and I couldn’t resist the urge to try it.

Take one pint ice cream – I used butter pecan – and let it sit until it’s soft enough to be squished around with a wooden spoon.

Then add 1.5 cups self-rising flour.  Mix until it’s thoroughly combined.  Dump into a 8×4 loaf pan.

Bake at 350F for 45 minutes.

You get this:

Is it a great gourmet masterpiece? No. But it was solidly good.  I’ll probably never make it again, but it was a fun thing to do once.  And it would be a great project for a kid on a rainy afternoon!

For no apparent reason, I’ve been in the mood for banana bread.  I’d been putting it off until I went to the grocery store this weekend, where I found a bunch of 5 overripe bananas marked down to $.69.  I couldn’t pass them up, so they came home with me.

I have a really good banana bread recipe, with coconut and lime, but I didn’t really want something quite that complicated.  I’m not sure where this recipe came from originally – it’s one of those recipes that lurks in the depths of my recipe database.

I always cheat, and instead of mashing bananas by hand, I just toss them in the stand mixer for a few minutes. After they were sufficiently “mashed”, I took them out of the bowl, then creamed the butter and brown sugar, then added two eggs and put the bananas back in.

I never bother putting dry ingredients in a separate bowl – I just use a bigger measuring cup, and mix them in there.  In this case, I put the 2 cups of flour in my 4-cup measuring cup, and there was plenty of room to mix in the baking soda and salt.  I added a dash of cinnamon to the dry ingredients, but it wasn’t in the recipe.

The dry ingredients went on top of the wet ingredients and got mixed very lightly.  If you wanted nuts, you could add them here, but I didn’t have any.

Then the batter went in a greased loaf pan and baked for an hour.

This is one of the most banana-y banana bread recipes I’ve ever had.  The texture is perfect:

Not every recipe has to be complicated. Sometimes the simple things are perfect just the way they are.

( see the recipe )

I’ve never been a huge fan of PopTarts. When they’re cold, I think they taste primarily like preservatives. Toasted, they taste primarily like warm preservatives.

But I like the idea of the toaster pastry. They make great breakfast food and even better snack food. And as someone who has a really bad habit of opening jars of jam, eating half of them, then forgetting about them, they give me a great way way to use up the rest of the jam.

I made these once a long time back, using the Good Eats recipe. They were good – certainly an improvement over the packaged ones! – but not amazing.

Then a few weeks ago, a friend gave me a jar of homemade peach-ginger jam. And I thought it would make an amazing toaster pasty filling, so I went looking for a new recipe.

This time, I tried the King Arthur Flour version. I have somewhat mixed feelings about their recipes in general – I think too many of the new ones rely on their special ingredients, but the ones that don’t tend to be really great.

Their recipe called for a cinnamon and brown sugar filling, but I was mostly interested in the pastry part.

It looked like a Brioche recipe to me – a very rich dough, with lots of milk and butter. It wasn’t hard to put together – whisk the flour with some sugar and salt, then work in the butter. I could have used a pastry cutter, but I just worked it in with my fingertips. It goes faster if the butter is slightly softened.

Then add an egg and milk to bring the dough together, then roll it out. I didn’t fiddle too much with getting the dough perfectly square – someday I’ll figure out how to roll out perfect 9×12 squares of dough, but it isn’t going to be today. I trimmed off the edges to square the dough up, then I cut it into three long strips, and cut each one of those in half.

I was careful to keep the “pairs” together. I put the bottom halves on a Silpat on a cookie sheet, spooned on the filling, then put on the tops. I did half of them with the cinnamon-brown sugar filling, and the other half with the peach jam.

The edges get sealed with a fork, just like a pie crust. I had better luck if I dipped the fork in flour first – even after it was rolled out, the dough was a bit sticky. I poked holes in the top to vent (and so I could tell which filling was in which pastries!). Then into the fridge for half an hour while the oven preheated.

I intentionally under-baked them just a bit, so they’d finish browning in the toaster later. I was afraid if I browned them all the way in the oven, they’d get burnt in the toaster.

Most of them didn’t survive to the next day to go into the toaster, though. The peach jam ones were by far the best, but the cinnamon was good too.

I’m tempted to make a half-size version for my next party. They’d make great finger food, and I’m always looking for recipes where I can make a big batch with lots of different flavors inside for variety. Let’s see, I could do cherry, and strawberry, and maybe chocolate – ooh, I bet you could get away with any sturdy pastry cream, too….

( see the recipe )