Stollen - German Christmas Cake

This is my all-time favourite recipe. I don't use yeast, which makes the Stollen lighter. The recipe is usually for one bigger Stollen, but I prefer to make two smaller ones. One for me and one as a present :)

And the great thing about this Christmas Cake is, that you can eat it as soon as it's cooled down!

Ingredients:

• 500g Raisins
• 100ml Rum
• 250g Cream Flour
• 250g Self-raising Flour
• 14 g  Baking powder
• 150g Sugar
• 1 tsp Vanilla essence
• pinch of salt
• 1/2 tsp Almond essence
• 1 tsp Mixed spice
• or a tip of a knife each of
• ground cloves
• ground cardamon
• ground ginger
• ground nutmeg
• ground cinnamon
• rind of 1/2 untreated orange
• 2 Eggs
• 175g soft Butter
• 250g Quark (Fromage Frais) 
• 200g ground Almonds
• 200g candied peel
• 200g Marzipan (or make your own almond paste)

For decoration:

• 100g melted butter
• 100g icing sugar (or more if needed)

Method:

1. Cover the raisins with the rum and leave for a couple of hours, preferably over night.
2. Pre-heat fan-oven at 200 degrees, bake at lower heat of 160 - 180 degrees.
3. Mix the flour, baking powder, sugar, vanilla essence, salt, almond essence, spices, orange rind, eggs and butter together in a bowl.
4. Add the Quark (fromage frais)
5. Mix all ingredients together to a dough.
6. Pour ground almonds onto worktop.
7. Add the dough to the almonds and start kneading.
8. Add the raisins and candied peel, by kneading it into the dough.
9. Keep kneading until there's no more almonds on the worktop and the dough is nice and smooth. You might need to add extra flour to keep the dough from sticking.
10. Divide the dough into two half's.
11. Roll them out into a sausage and flatten them to an oval shape (I usually just flatten it with my hand) about 1 cm thick
12. Use half of the Marzipan and knead it to soften it. Then roll it into a sausage, nearly to the same length as the dough and flatten it with your hand.
13. Put the marzipan in the middle of the dough, length-ways.
14. Fold the dough from both long sides over the marzipan,towards the middle, so the dough overlaps on top.
15. Repeat for the second dough.
16. Cover baking tray with tinfoil and baking paper.
17. Put both doughs onto baking tray.
18. Bake in the middle of the pre-heated oven at 160 - 180 degrees for 50-60 Minutes.
19. Remove Stollen from oven and straight away pour over the melted butter and dust with icing sugar. 
20. Can be eaten once it's cooled.