Holiday Baking

Last weekend I went over to a friends house and we made Stollen.  I had no idea what stollen bread was, so I'm betting most of you don't either.  Stollen is a Danish bread that you put a bunch of stuff in, nice description huh?  We had a fun time and made some pretty tastey bread.  I don't know how my friend made the dough, all I know is she has a sour dough start named Fred.

We spread out the dough and covered it with our fillings of choice.  There are walnuts, dried cranberries and apricots

 Once we had all our fillings on it we rolled it up and then let it rest for a little bit.

 Then we worked all the fruit and nuts into the bread and then let it rest again (apparently dough doesn't like working too hard.)

Here we are putting some almond paste to be a sweet surprise in the middle of the bread. 

Here is the bread all wrapped up and ready to go in to the oven. 

Yum, a slice of my freshly baked bread, tasty.  Hope everyone gets a chance to do some holiday baking if they enjoy that kind of stuff!