Tag: cardamom

Faux Stollen–Just as Tasty as the Real Thing!

I’ve been on a little bit of a Christmas baking kick. One of the things I got hungry for a couple of weeks ago (before Thanksgiving, even) was stollen–a German Christmas bread with cardamom and almonds.

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My mom used to be all over the bread-making–she did a batch of whole-wheat bread every week or so, she made fantastic sticky buns every so often, and she was not daunted by making stollen, which is also a yeast bread. We had it every year for Christmas breakfast.

But then…the regular bread-making tapered off. Then the treats like sticky buns went. (I think this had to do with my mom starting to do real paying work–the brutal ’80s. Also, we moved to a house with a less inspiring kitchen.) And then the stollen gave out.

But not in a bad way. It’s just that my mom found a recipe for a quick-bread version of stollen (ie, no yeast required) in a most unlikely spot: The Vegetarian Epicure, by Anna Thomas. In its day, it was a classic, but it now seems to be out of print. Vegetarians don’t have a great reputation for baking, but this recipe alone rights several decades of carob-based wrongs.

Which is not to say I haven’t tinkered with it. I replaced mace with nutmeg, for instance–I figured that if I, who keeps a very extensive spice rack, have no other call for mace the whole rest of the year, it’s just not worth it. And candied lemon peel–too icky-sweet. I also make it in a food processor sometimes, which is handy (and helps infuse the bread with the flavor of the fresh lemon peel).

And in perhaps the most genius innovation (if I do say so), I split the recipe into two small loaves–one for eating fresh, and one for freezing and eating later. We’ve only got two mouths here on Christmas morning this year, but that wouldn’t stop me from trying to finish the better part of a whole loaf myself, and then moaning all day about how my stomach hurts. The bread has quite a bit of butter in it, see, but that doesn’t stop me from slathering a little bit more on each slice.

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Almond-Cardamom Christmas Bread (aka Faux Stollen)

This recipe relies heavily on a food processor, though I do suggest other options in the instructions. The only thing that it’s really nice to have a food processor for is grinding the almonds. So if you don’t have one, you’ll want to buy 3/4 cup of ground almonds or really go to town on some sliced almonds with a sharp knife, or pound them in a mortar.

Makes 2 6-by-4-inch loaves, or one 10-by-6-inch loaf
3/4 cup sugar
zest from 2 lemons
1 cup blanched sliced almonds, divided
2 1/2 cups flour, divided, plus more for kneading
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg (about half of a whole nutmeg)
1/2 teaspoon ground cardamom (seeds from 8-10 cardamom pods)
13 tablespoons butter, chilled and divided
1 cup cream cheese (one 8-oz. package)
1 egg
2 teaspoons vanilla
2 tablespoons brandy
1 cup golden raisins
Confectioner’s sugar (optional, for garnish)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. In the bowl of a food processor, combine the sugar and lemon zest. Pulse to combine–about 6 or 7 one-second pulses. (If you’re not using a fo-pro, just mix the sugar and zest together well in large bowl.) Add 3/4 cup sliced almonds and pulse again, until they are coarsely ground. Add 1 1/2 cups of flour, plus the baking powder, salt, nutmeg and cardamom. Pulse again to blend well.

Cut the butter into tablespoons. Add 12 tablespoons to the food processor and pulse until the mixture resembles coarse sand. (If no fo-pro, mix the butter in using a pastry cutter or two knives–whatever strategy you’d normally use for making pie crust.) Pour the contents of the food processor into a bowl.

Cut the cream cheese into small blocks and place in the food processor bowl (no need to wash it). Add the egg and run the processor to combine. While the processor is running, add the vanilla and brandy through the feed tube. (The Vegetarian Epicure suggests using a blender for this–so ’70s! And of course you could also use an electric mixer.)

Pour the cream-cheese mixture into a large bowl and stir in the raisins. Gradually stir in flour mixture with a wooden spoon or wide spatula, then add the remaining cup of flour, until you wind up with a thick, ragged dough.

Work the dough into a ball and turn it out on a heavily floured board. Knead it for just a minute or so, until it is reasonably smooth and holds together. Divide the dough in half. Shape each half into an oval, about 6 inches long and 5 inches wide. With the blunt edge of a knife, crease it just off center, lengthwise. Fold the smaller side over the larger and place the stollen on an ungreased baking sheet. (You can also make one large loaf, starting with an 8-by-10-inch oval.)

Melt the remaining 1 tablespoon butter in a small pan. Brush the loaves lightly with melted butter, then scatter over the remaining 1/4 cup sliced almonds. Bake for about 50 minutes–the bottoms of the loaves will be dark brown, and a toothpick stuck in the center will come out oily, but with no crumbs, though the whole thing will seem alarmingly underbaked. (A single large loaf will take more like 1 hour and 10 minutes to bake.)

Allow the loaves to cool slightly on racks, then dust with confectioner’s sugar. Allow to cool fully–at least a couple of hours–before slicing, to allow the center to set; plus, the cardamom and lemon flavors are stronger in the cooled bread.

Spain–He Is Risen!

Now that I’m Greek Orthodox, I’m not supposed to say this, but today is Easter. And you’d think that would be a day of rest in Spain, right? I mean, teams of 40 men have been carrying immensely heavy statues through the streets nearly all day, every day for a week. There was a special 100th-anniversary-of-something procession yesterday with all of the statues. Today everyone kicks back and eats, right?

Yeah, no. Three more groups are parading today, starting at noon. Como se dice ‘overkill’?

But to be fair, even last night I was still stunned by a procession. We caught one coming up a hill, without much of a crowd around. There’s this great super-slow Doppler effect with the band, which follows behind the statue. So the music’s getting louder and louder, but if you’re around a bend you can’t really see anything. And then the music is bouncing off the walls of the buildings super-loud just as the statue, surrounded by candles, emerges from the side street.

And then, as the statue goes by, and you’re boggling at how heavy it is, the band finally emerges and it is even LOUDER. And the bass drums go by last.

I saw this effect for the first time a few nights ago, with a statue of Christ hauling the cross, surrounded by centurions with huge feathers in their helmets. When the statue emerged from the side street, with the band blaring, all we saw first was the feathers. By the time the whole statue was visible, I expected Jesus and the soldiers to be doing a big kick line routine.

On the research front, things have gotten a little easier. We’ve figured out the route to break out of our little procession island, and know better to avoid bars right on the routes, because they’re mobbed and are basically pulling tapas out of their asses. “Beer coasters? Toss ’em in the fryer! Forty more people just showed up!”

Yesterday was a good day for research–I checked a fair amount of stuff of my list, and it even felt a little easy and like I was ahead of the game.

Then I looked at my watch, and I realized I’d been walking, with Beverly tagging along behind, for ten hours straight.

We started out after our churros and chocolate–the logical thing to eat when it’s 44 degrees out. But apparently the rest of the city thought so too. I have never seen bars so frenzied, even at night. The place where we did finally get our ch-and-ch fix–an excellent rec from AV–looked like a war zone inside, with empty chocolate cups four deep and two high stacked all along the bar. So we sat outside, which was for the best, since we were wearing every layer of clothing we packed (six each), and it would’ve been too difficult to adjust to a heated room.

The chocolate was thick as pudding, and the churros actually had a little ridgy texture, which I have seen only up in northern Spain–down south here, they’re usually they’re just smooth round tubes. And they were so perfectly fried and light they were almost empty inside. We shared a table with an older Spanish couple, the only people we saw all day who were as bundled up as we were.

Later, I admit, we did stop for a fairly nice lunch. Lovely baby beans with ham, and some nice fancy mushrooms. A real live green salad. And some too-creative-sounding veal with cardamom that turned out to be good. Finished with a little dab of orange wine that the waiter, who looked like Peter Dinklage, gave me for free, because apparently it was available only by the bottle. Crazy.

And later we took a 15-minute break in a bar that went from funky-neighborhoody to totally skeevy in the time it took for the foam to settle on our beers. While I was looking in the kitchen and noticing that when the sign said “food cooked with love,” they really meant “food cooked with cigarette butts and dirty wads of paper towels,” the older regulars at the bar were replaced by strung-out hippies, one of whom was doing the junkie lean into his beer. The review I was writing in my head was quickly discarded, and I pushed my octopus tapa around, feeling bad that it had died in vain. We fled up the street and took solace in a church with a very strange collection of artifacts, none labeled.

Which reminds me–earlier in the day, we saw an honest-to-God shrunken head in another museum! Why that museum is not listed in the guidebook I cannot for the life of me imagine. I can’t wait to rectify that oversight, and type the words “shrunken head” in the manuscript! First I will have to figure out what the whole point of the museum is, though–the guided tour was in Spanish, and while I thought I understood what the guy was saying most of the time, when I strung it all together at the end for Beverly, I realized it made no sense at all.

I’m sure a million other funny things have happened, but they’ve all been beaten out of my head by those bass drums. Monday is going to be quiet, right?