Stollen is a cake-like fruit bread made with yeast, water and flour, and usually with zest added to the dough.

Other ingredients, such as milk, sugar, butter, salt, rum, eggs,[2] vanilla,[3] other dried fruits and nuts and marzipan, may also be added to the dough.

[9] As a Christmas bread, stollen was baked for the first time at the Saxon Royal Court in 1427,[10] and was made with flour, yeast, oil and water.

[6] In the 15th century, in medieval Saxony (in central Germany, north of Bavaria and south of Brandenburg), the Prince Elector Ernst (1441–1486) and his brother Duke Albrecht (1443–1500) decided to remedy this by writing to the Pope in Rome.

[citation needed] Others were also permitted to use butter, but on the condition of having to pay annually 1/20 of a gold coin Gulden to support the building of the Freiberg Minster.

[13] In 1560, the bakers of Dresden offered the rulers of Saxony Christmas stollen weighing 36 pounds (16 kg) each as gifts, and the custom continued.

In 1730, he impressed his subjects, ordering the Bakers’ Guild of Dresden to make a giant 1.7-tonne stollen, big enough for everyone to have a portion to eat.

A carriage takes the cake in a parade through the streets of Dresden to the Christmas market, where it is ceremoniously cut into pieces and distributed among the crowd, in return for a small payment which goes to charity.

[14] The largest stollen was baked in 2010 by Lidl; it was 72.1 metres (237 ft) long and was certified by the Guinness Book of World Records, at the railway station of Haarlem.