Cranberry and White Chocolate Panettone

It would be fair to say that I had never actually heard of Panettone until I met my Husband.  He loves it toasted on Boxing Day morning for breakfast, in fact this has become a bit of a tradition in our family.  But he is incredibly fussy about the Panettone that he gets, it has to be authentic, it has to be the real deal. Last year we left it too late to get his Panettone, his favourite brand had been sold out, Boxing Day just wasn't the same!  This year I've decided to try my hand at making some of my own Panettone, there are a few recipes on the must try list (all non traditional of course!) and I've made a start with this one.



Cranberry and White Chocolate Panettone
500g plain flour , plus extra for dusting
2 x 7g sachets easy-blend dried yeast
100g golden caster sugar
200ml milk
3 eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract
200g butter, softened
175g dried cranberries
185g white chocolate , chopped into chunks
To Finish
1 egg , lightly beaten
2 tbsp flaked almonds

Tip the flour, yeast and 1 tsp salt into the food processor fitted with a dough blade. Mix briefly, then add the sugar and mix again. Warm the milk to hand hot and, in a separate bowl, beat the eggs with the vanilla extract. Add both the milk and eggs to the dry ingredients and mix to a soft dough. Work the dough in the processor for 2 mins, then leave in the machine until doubled in size, about 1 hr.

Cut softened butter into the processor, pulse until incorporated, leave for a further 1 hr to rise again. Add the cranberries, candied peel and white chocolate to the machine, then pulse gently to mix evenly.

Butter and base line a 20cm deep cake tin. Make a 10cm collar with double thickness baking paper and line the sides of the tin. Tip the dough out onto a lightly floured surface and knead briefly to shape into a ball. The dough will be very soft, so flour your hands well before handling it and work quickly. Drop the dough into the tin and leave to rise for 30 mins. Heat oven to 180C/160C fan/gas 4.

Brush top of the dough liberally with beaten egg and scatter over almonds. Bake for 45-50 mins until the well risen and deep golden brown. Turn out of the tin and cool on a wire rack. Cut into wedges to serve. Will keep for 2 weeks wrapped in foil, or freeze on the day of making for up to 1 month.

Serves 8
Good Food Mag, Jan 10

I made a couple of changes to the recipe, as is my style!  Selfishly I omitted the mixed peel in the original recipe and bumped the white chocolate up by the same amount.  And I also wanted to make individual panettone so I saved up some tin cans and used them to bake the bread in, this worked pretty well.  After reading some of the comments from other bakers on the website I knew this dough was going to be incredibly soft so I didn't bother with trying to shape the dough into a ball, instead I just popped handfuls of the mixture into the lined tin cans.  I was a bit skeptical of making the dough in the food processor too, but it actually worked out really well and the lazy side of me appreciated the machine doing all the hard labour!

The real test of the recipe was in the tasting of course.  I loved it, especially while it was still warm from the oven but its also pretty delish when its cold too.  Hubby gave it 8 stars out of 10, I got marked down for not baking it in one big tin!  Flavour wise he gave it top marks and has asked for a fresh batch to be baked for Christmas!