Today we have a special treat for you, and a first for the Hive – a recipe!

Author and baker Daniel Polansky joins us to share with us his recipe for Spring Stollen. His latest novel, portal fantasy March’s End, is out today from Angry Robot books! 

Before we pass you over to Daniel, let’s find out a little more about March End:

March’s End is a multi-generational portal fantasy of strange magics, epic warfare, and deadly intrigue, in which the personality conflicts and toxic struggles of the Harrow family are reflected in the fantasy world they’ve sworn to protect.

The Harrows are a typical suburban family who, since time immemorial, have borne a sacred and terrible charge. In the daylight they are teachers, doctors, bartenders and vagrants, but at night they are the rulers and protectors of the March, a fantastical secondary world populated with animate antiquated toys and sentient lichen, a panorama of the impossible where cities are carried on the backs of giant snails, and thunderstorms can be subdued with song.

But beneath this dreamlike exterior lie dark secrets, and for generation after generation the Harrows have defended the March from the perils that wait outside its borders – when they are not consumed in their own bitter internecine quarrels.

In the modern day the Harrow clan are composed of Sophia, the High Queen of the March, a brilliant, calculating matriarch, and her three children – noble Constance, visionary, rebellious Mary Ann, and clever, amoral Will. Moving back and forth between their youth, adolescence, and adulthood, we watch as this family fractures, then reconciles in the face of a conflict endangering not only the existence of the March, but of the ‘real world’ itself.

March’s End is a book about growing up, in which the familial struggles of the Harrows are threaded through the mythic history of the fantastical land they protect. It is a story of failure and redemption, in which the power of love is tested against forces that seek to break it, and the necessity of each generation to recreate itself is asserted.

March’s End is out now from Angry Robot – order your copy HERE

Spring Stollen

Daniel Polansky

     I am a sucker for enriched dough and elaborate recipes and therefore of the wide variety of European Christmas breads, from impossibly fluffy panetonne to hot cross buns and in particular, German stollen. I like stollen for its funny name [shtol-len] and for its excess of ingredients and because I like to have jars of fruit stewing in the corners of my kitchen like hidden baubles and because I think marzipan—or March Pane, as it was called by your distant English forebearers. Apart from the cheap pun (March’s End releases May 9th!) there is something about marzipan which, like Turkish delight, evokes a sense of wonder and childhood fantasy. Where I lived once upon a time in Northern Germany they would make marzipan into elaborate and whimsical shapes, sugar-paste castles and dragons.

              I like stollen so much, actually, that I’ve been pushing for its adoptions year-round. Below is my attempt at a spring stollen, which is basically just stollen with some floral notes and a new shape. Without entering into a religious debate on the matter, the half-oval in which stollen is traditionally formed, and which is said to reflect the Virgin Mary cradling a sugary baby Jesus, means that any given slice of bread will be mostly without marzipan. I would instead recommend rolling the bread out into a snake-like batard and nestling the marzipan inside.

Note that while in theory this can be made without a mixer, hand-adding room-temp butter as you knead the bread, in practice this will take much, much longer than you think it will and doesn’t work that well, so maybe skip it.

Note also that this has been adapted from Peter Reinhardt’s The Bread Baker’s Apprentice, which is about as good a starter book on breads as anyone could write.

(Makes 2 stollen)

Ingredients:

For the Fruit/Nut Mix

340g of mixed, dried, Spring stone fruits (I used plums, pluots and apricots, but you can use whatever), diced

170g rum, schnapps (or orange juice or simple syrup)

For the sponge

113g whole milk

64g bread flour

4tsps yeast

Final Dough

284g bread flour

15g sugar

5.5g salt

1 large egg

71g unsalted butter, room temp

57g room temp whole milk

Bar of marzipan

Powdered sugar for dusting.

              Step 1: The day before (or two days, or the week before, or six months before) dice up all your dried fruit and put it in bowl with your booze of choice. Cover and fridge. Top off with more booze if necessary.

              Step 2: For the sponge, warm the milk on your stove to hand-hot temp. Mix it with the flour and yeast to form a batter. Cover and wait until the sponge is bubbly and big and looks like it’s about to collapse.

             Step 3: To make the final dough, add the flour, salt, yeast, and sugar to your mixing bowl. Add the sponge, the egg, the rest of the milk. Mix until incorporated. Mix on 2^nd speed in an electric mixer for 3-4 minutes. Then, gradually add the room temperature butter of the course of the next 5-6 minutes. Your goal is a soft, smooth tacky (but not sticky) dough.

              Step 4: Add the fruit and nut mix by hand, incorporating into the dough. The stollen will look and feel kind of weird, because at this point it’s about ½ fruit and nut. Don’t worry about it.

              Step 5: Transfer the dough to a large bowl lightly coated in oil. Cover with plastic wrap and allow to rise at room temperature for about an hour. The dough will expand slightly but probably not double.

              Step 6: Lightly flour your kitchen counter (or another reasonable space) and remove the dough from the bowl. Divide in two. Working with one half at a time, stretch each piece into a rectangle roughly 8 by 6 inches. (This is going to be difficult and look ugly but don’t get annoyed, you’ll be covering the whole thing with powdered sugar at the end so no one will care.) Divide your bar of marzipan into two, and roll out half into a 7 inch cylinder. Place the cylinder in the center of the dough rectangle, then close the two halves to seem. Repeat with the other piece of dough.

              Step 7: Place the two halves on a parchment lined sheet pan, cover in plastic wrap, and allow to proof for 1-2 hours. The bread may not rise very much.

              Step 8: Towards the end of your proofing time, preheat your oven for 350F (180c). Bake the stollen for 40 minutes, rotating the pan halfway through. When finished, your stollen should register 190F (88c) on quick-read thermometer.

              Step 9: Transfer the bread to a rack, brush with melted butter and coat with buttered sugar. Traditionally stollen is left to cure and eaten weeks or even months after it’s been baked, but I like my sweets piping hot and never manage to make it that far.