Our Christmas Stollen each contain a lump of butter about the size of a baby’s head.

And they’re guaranteed polybrominated diphenyl ether-free, which is more than you can say for American versions, which have a fair chance of being laced with the above substance which happens to be a flame retardant.

So if you’re on our Christmas Stollen list and suffer from a tendency towards spontaneous combustion, just let me know and I’ll get Kate or Virginia to send me some tainted supplies.

And talking of combustion…

We got our recipe from Reinhilde‘s Mum who used to bake by the hundred and sell them for a good cause.

Usual list of ingredients (at the moment, you could wake me up in the middle of the night and I’d be able to recite them without a mistake….) and then…

“Set the oven at 250ºC”

Thought it was a bit high (on reflection, perhaps she was using American butter…), but away we went.

Smoke POURS out of the oven within minutes, smoke alarms go off, paramedics transport baking staff to local hospital suffering from smoke inhalation.

After recovering from my lung transplant, I broached the subject with Frau Eckert

“Oh, you have to turn the oven down to 180ºC after you’ve put the Stollen in… Didn’t I write that? Oh my goodness”

14 Dec This entry was published on 14 December, 2010 at 12:00. It’s filed under Culinary, Mainz and tagged christmas. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.