If you follow this recipe as laid out it works out fantastic and is very delicious. I have cooked it for one Christmas party and for a Christams Eve dinner this year (2007), I ended up passing on the recipe to another 6 people they liked it so much. One variation I did for the Christmas was to use 1/2 cup less of the brown and white sugars to make it a little less sweet, I also cooked it on a cookie sheet with parchment paper, it took only 60 minutes to cook. It was just as delicious and a little less sweet which went well with the turkey dinner. Both times I cooked this the sausage was fully cooked and you could not even tell it was in the bread. Lastly - no worries about the sausage being cooked and yes I mixed it in raw. It does not look very apatizing prior to cooking; but, it is outstanding once cooked and looks a little like the traditional fruit cakes.

It's possible that I didn't do something right, but this bread was terrible. Not knowing what I was supposed to do with the sausage, I added it raw to the wet ingredients per the instructions, and it made kind of a thick sludge to which the dry ingredients were added. Once baked off, the bread was just very dense with a strange flavor, vaguely resembling sausage, and clashing horribly with the spices and sweetness. I also thought the bread was too sweet, but then again I tend to not like things as sweet as the average person. Perhaps the sausage should have been cooked and crumbled, and then folded into the bread batter? I could almost see that -- sort of a sweet/savory kind of holiday bread. I hope I just misunderstood the instructions!