Christmas stollen

My most beautiful cookbook (shut up, it is beautiful) Home Baking has a lot of seasonal breads in it, and I've been meaning to make the stollen for a few years now, despite the fact it never was anything I had in my childhood or a family tradition or anything. Although the Germans do seem to do Christmas best; my mother does make lebkuchen cookies with oblaten wafers every year. These are heavy on the almonds, so I never eat them unless she refrains from decorating some. Anyway, some helpful links:
.wav file for pronunciation
stollen is praised by gawker, so it must be good

My version involves the previously mentioned candied peel, and dried cranberries. No one likes raisins, son. It's quark stollen, but quark is somewhat lacking in the bodegas and markets of Brooklyn, so I substituted Greek yogurt. Germans and Greeks get along, right? My recipe had no almonds, but many do. Or, worse, marzipan. (It's harder to see and pick out marzipan than it is almond slivers.) Seriously, people, stop it with the almonds. It's kind of trying too hard, really. The fruit is all soaked overnight in a mixture of orange juice, rum and black tea. Mmm.
I halved the recipe, which was a blessing, as the loaves made are humongous. Here they are, wrapped up in swaddling clothes. Uh, saran wrap. This isn't blasphemous, as stollen are supposed to look swaddled. Or mine entrances. It's all a bit confusing, really. See the first link above. I froze one, ate half of one over the course of a week and took the rest home.

Candied Peel

You know what everyone's favorite part of the orange is? The pith! Followed closely by the peel. But how to best extract the pith from the icky juicy fruit part? By being hideously artsy, apparently.

All this is to say, I don't especially like candied fruit. It, usually comes packaged with some sort of dark green peel and maraschino cherries, which I have reason to believe I'm allergic to. (That link also indicates that the dark green stuff is peppermint-flavored cherries. This is one of the nastiest things I've ever heard of. What is wrong with you people?) But, I wanted to make stollen, because it is Christmas! Therefore, I had (HAD!) to make my own candied peel. Obviously. Also, I was procrastinating from studying for my finals, which are, thankfully, over by now. Here are the before,
after, and results pictures of the peeling process.
The lemons were thin-skinned and very hard to peel. Next time, (ha! this batch had better last me for years) I will pick out the thick-skinned lemons. Then insult them. This recipe (and the upcoming stollen recipe) comes from Home Baking. This is barely a recipe though, you boil the peels for an hour, then change the water and boil them again for 20 minutes, then boil in a 2:1 sugar:water mixture for another hour, and let dry for a few days and coat in sugar. Now, it also says if you want smaller pieces (as I did) you should cut the peel in between water boilings. I forgot completely until they were already in boiling sugar syrup. As someone who got a blister between their thumb and index finger from boiling sugar during badminton week in gym, I was not about to slice up those peels. I did hack at them with kitchen shears for a while though to at least get them smaller. As it turned out, it wasn't hard to cut them after they dried, and the big ones were easier to flip over during the drying process, so not too much lost, I guess.