Name: Italian Christmas Bread (Panettone)
Yield: One 9-inch cake, 8 to 10 servings
Cuisine: Italian
Ingredients: 3 cups unbleached bread or all-purpose flour; 2 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted, for finishing; 3 large eggs plus 3 large egg yolks, at room temperature; 2 teaspoons vanilla extract; ⅓ cup sugar; 1 teaspoon finely grated lemon zest; ½ teaspoon salt; ½ cup (about 3 ounces) each diced candied orange peel, dark raisins or currants, and golden raisins; 2¼ teaspoons (1 envelope) active dry or instant yeast; 1 tablespoon white rum; ¾ cup unbleached all-purpose flour; 8 tablespoons (1 stick) unsalted butter, softened; ½ cup milk

Preparation info

One 9 inch cake,
8 to 10
servings

Difficulty
Easy

Appears in

How to Bake

By Nick Malgieri

Published 1995

About

In Italy, panettone is the traditional Christmas bread—offered when friends drop in throughout the holiday season, served for breakfast Christmas morning, and sometimes filled with pastry cream or chocolate to make a fancy dessert.

Though in Italy panettone is prepared in some pastry shops, most often, even there, it comes from the same industrial bakeries that market their panettoni in the United States—Motta, Alemagna, and Tre Marie, to name a few.

Panettone, whether prepa