My favorite thing about Christmas is making the dishes that I learned from the matriarchs of our family. These handed down recipes are very dear to my heart. My mom taught me how to make our family Christmas Bread, we all knew it was my dad's mother Elizabeth Larson’s special recipe. This dough is also the same for her famous cinnamon rolls.
7-10 cups white flour
2 packages of Fleishman’s yeast
1 cup Sugar
1 tsp cardamom
1 tsp nutmeg
4 cups milk
1/4 cup butter
2 eggs
1 cup dried maraschino cherries chopped in one cup of flour
1 cup pecans or walnuts chopped
First proof yeast- open two packages of yeast into a large glass bowl (never metal as it will kill the yeast) mix with a ¼ cup of water and 1 tsp sugar. Put in a warm place to proof while you put together other ingredients.
Mix warmed milk, soft butter, cardamon, nutmeg, eggs and sugar together then gently fold proofed yeast into these ingredients.
Next add 7-10 cups of flour and the cherries and walnuts; you know you have added enough flour to the dough when you can’t stir it any more. *It is important to mix the cherries with flour as you chop them up, to prevent them from bleeding into the dough making it look pink. Some people use red and green cherries for Christmas but we never used green ones because it makes the bread look like it has little bits of green mould in it.
Grandma Larson told me not to over work the dough or it gets tough so just stir until everything is mixed.
Next lightly cover top of dough with vegetable oil then cover with wax paper or a dish towel, put in a non drafty warm place and let it rise; once it doubles in size punch it down back into a ball. Always generously oil your hands before handling the dough so that it doesn’t stick to your hands.
Take the ball of dough out of the bowl and place on a heavily floured cutting board; cut into 8 equal parts and place on greased cookie sheets (2-3 balls per sheet). Now put in a non-drafty warm place and allow to rise. It is very important that the place is not too hot because you don’t want the outside of the dough to cook, as this will prevent the dough from growing.
Once the dough has doubled in size put them in the oven to cook for 20 minutes at 350 degrees.
Icing
Melt ¼ cup of butter
1 cup of powdered sugar
1 tsp vanilla
1 tsp water
Prepare the same icing as for the Molasses Bars and once again as soon as you take the bread out of the oven paint it with the icing and shake sprinkles on the top while it is still hot so they stick. We use candy sprinkles not sugar sprinkles because the sugar ones bleed/melt on the hot bread.
Years ago after we sold our farm in Calgary we were so excited to try out the new oven that first Christmas in our new house but we didn’t realize that the new fancy marble counters would hinder the process. We couldn’t figure out why the dough wouldn’t rise, finally grams pointed out that the marble counters were a lot colder than the old formica one in our old house. We ended up putting the dough on the wood floors in front of the warm oven it get them to rise, and sure enough it did the trick!
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