Panettone - Make Your Own

Panettone is one of the most delicious Christmas treats, and it's easy to make. I've been making them every Christmas for years now, originally adapted from this excellent recipe here. 

I hate sites where you have to scroll for days to get to the ingredients, so without further ado, you will need:

• 500g white bread flour

• 250g butter (room temperature)

• 4 eggs

• 50g raisins

• 75g dried apricots

• 100g sultanas

• 100g candied peel

• 50g flaked almonds or chopped nuts

• 100ml milk

• 80g sugar

• Zest of 1 lemon & 1 orange

• 3 teaspoons of fast acting dried yeast

• 2 teaspoons of bread improver

• Half teaspoon of salt

• Quarter teaspoon of vanilla extract

• 50ml rum

So you've gathered your ingredients, now get a tin, oil it, and line it deep, i.e. make a tall tube of baking paper and stand it inside, with a disc of paper in the bottom too. I use a cake tin with a push out base. Then oil the inside of the paper too.

Put all the fruit in a bowl (you'll need to slice up the apricots) and pour on the rum, let it soak.

Put the flour, yeast, salt, butter, sugar, lemon and orange zests, bread improver, milk, vanilla, sugar and eggs into a bread machine or a food mixer with a dough hook. Mix, kneed, make it into a soggy dough. If it doesn't look soggy put more milk in it or another egg. Leave it to rest until roughly doubled in size. In my bread machine that's 45 minutes from turning it on, but your mileage may vary according to how you kneed and raise.

Tip it out, mix in the fruit and nuts (drink the residual rum). This is best done on a well floured surface, spread the dough out with a rolling pin (look out, it's all very sticky), spread some fruit on, mix it in, spread it out again, you get the picture.

Dump it in to the lined tin, cover with a plastic bag (on top of your big paper tube) and leave it to rise, until it's well and truly doubled. Some recipes seem to assume that'll take forever, but with the bread improver powder (basically vitamin C and gluten) that's not the case, it'll be done in a couple of hours.

Brush the top with egg or milk cut a little cross in it to give it space to rise, and put it in the oven preheated to 180C for 20 minutes, then turn the heat down and give it another 40 minutes. It should be done, but if the skewer test says it isn't give it a little longer.

It's traditional to skewer them and hang them upside down to cool, but it shouldn't be necessary. Turn it out and leave it on a wire rack to cool.

And that's it, that's your panettone. As fine a Christmas cake as exists in any cuisine.