It's great to have a few flexible adaptable recipes. When I was looking at stollen recipes it occured to me that my Rice Bread recipe would make an excellent dough to use in stollen. The recipe was developed for making free form bread, and is quite adaptable. After researching online and in bread making books I settled on Jan Hedh's Yule log for inspiration.
Instead of placing a stick of almond paste in the middle, I chose to roll the almond paste flat and roll it up with the dough.
A few years ago we made liqueur from home grown green gages. drinking the liqueur is like drinking nectar. We still have some that is a little cloudy, so it was an obvious contender for use in soaking the fruit. The flavour worked well with cardamom, nutmeg, vanilla, almond and lemon.
The stollen is delicious, much better than I had expected for a first bake of a new recipe.
The Rice Bread recipe is available in my store.
Jan Hedh's book is 'Artisan Breads - Practical Recipes and Detailed Instructions for Baking the World's Finest Loaves', Skyhorse, New York, 2011. ISBN 978-1-6-61608487-5