Almond Filled Stollen is a traditional German/Austrian bread rich with butter, almond paste, candied fruit and a hint of rum.

Whew, can you believe it took me almost 30 years to make this bread? Well, not the actual loaf you see in the photos, that only took a couple of hours. But the recipe for this bread was 30 years in the making.

As I’ve mentioned before, my first job out of pastry school was with a well-known and well-respected Austrian pastry chef. It was a year of very, very intense training and long hours, but I sure learned a lot.

I also collected some wonderful recipes that I use to this day. Well, I didn’t just collect the recipes, I had to earn them. Whenever we made a recipe for the first time we were expected to write down the ingredients and all the steps in our personal recipe book. The chef actually reviewed our books from time to time and made notes on the recipes. It really was an on-the-job learning experience.

Anyway, I worked at this bakery for one holiday season. We made stollen weeks before Christmas and set it aside to “ripen”. I’d never tasted Almond Filled Stollen before and I was immediately obsessed. I thought it was one of the best things I’d ever eaten and I really, really wanted the recipe.

The only problem was, the chef made the dough before we came to work that morning. We never actually put together the ingredients or had the chance to record the recipe. Arg!

My friend Suzie was able to write down a list of ingredients for the Stollen. But it was not much to work with. You can see my cryptic 30-year-old note in the photo below.

This is all I had to work from to recreate the recipe. A random list of ingredients, scaled to produce dozen of loaves.

Well, Ok. This was my starting point. You can see why it took me 30 years to buckle-down and recreate the recipe.

I reviewed stollen recipes in my favorite books and on the web. After comparing them to “the random list” I had a pretty good working recipe.

I also had a few memories to work from. Most of the recipes I reviewed either had no filling or a marizpan filling. I remembered specifically that our bread was filled with a mixture of almond paste and butter. I just had to work out the percentages.

All the recipes I reviewed instruct the baker to brush the bread with butter after it comes out of the oven. I remembered that we dunked the entire loaf in melted butter. Yup, the entire loaf was, literally, bathed in butter! I knew I had to be very generous with the butter coating.

Finally, after aging the bread we brushed away the granulated sugar coating and sprinkled a thick layer of powdered sugar as the finishing touch. I would include these three steps in my stollen recipe.

After 30 years I was finally ready to bake Almond Filled Stollen. The very first test-loaves were really good and just got better over the course of a week. With just a few more tweaks I had my stollen recipe, finally!

I’m really happy with the result. I honestly can’t say how close it is to the original, but at this point I don’t think it really matters. What matters is, this is a good stollen recipe.

I think it was worth the wait and I hope you do to.

C