In the first years after her death I wasn't experienced enough to believe I could attempt her Christmas bread. Time moves along and my cooking improved and somebody invented the bread machine. I got one. Mine is a Panasonic SD-YD200 Bread Bakery.
Over the years since I got my bread machine I tried recipes from Joy of Cooking, 3 different editions. Betty Crocker's Cook Book. The Bread Bakery recipes for bread with fruit bits. My search just went on and on. Every year at Christmas I would carry the bread machine up from the basement, set it on my kitchen counter and start making another version of my mothers Christmas Bread. This year I searched my mothers old cookbooks and decided the bread recipe in a 1938 Watkins Recipe book sounded like it would taste like my mother's bread. There was also a recipe for Stollen Bread which was a close match for the Christmas Bread.
Trouble is, a 1938 recipe needs to be adapted for a 2001 bread machine. I found another bread recipe in Betty Crocker's New Picture Cook Book.(1961 edition) What I did next can only be the result of all those spreadsheets I used to have to do for my job. I took the three recipes and lined up the ingredients across a page and determined which ingredients to use from the different recipes. The recipe closest to the Bread Machine recipe was Betty Crocker's.
And this is the result:
Happy cook shows her bread fresh from the oven.
Mom only made this bread at Christmas and we all looked forward to the first slices once the bread had cooled enough to cut. I am not sure if she ever called it Stollen Bread. I think just plain old Christmas Bread was good enough. As a child I thought the candied fruit bits looked like Christmas tree lights. I couldn't tell you how many loaves she made each year but there was never enough. We would have the bread as an after school snack and also enjoyed it toasted in the mornings before we went to school. What a wonderful memory.
