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Panettone Baking

Home Baking

Majolica Cookie Jars

Pseudo-Panettone for Electric Bread Makers

The ingredients should all be at room temperature.  If they're not at room temperature, click on Little Miss Smarty Pants, to the right, to learn some cooking tricks.  

Put the ingredients into the Electric Bread Maker Pan in this order.  

4 tsp dry yeast

4 cups flour

2/3 cup sugar

2 tsp salt

1/2 tsp baking soda

3/4 cup melted butter

5 egg yolks

1 whole egg

3/4 cup milk

2 tsp vanilla extract

After the first mixing, (there is usually a signal), add the following ingredients.

1/4 cup diced candied orange and lemon peel

1/2 cup of mixed golden and black raisons

1-2 tsp grated lemon rind 

Cook the Pseudo-Panettone on your Bread Machine's Basic Program.  

At the end of the cooking time, if it is still a bit doughy or raw when you insert a knife, just let it sit in the warm machine on the Keep Warm Mode.  You don't want to overcook it because that makes the crust tough.  Wait 10 minutes or so, and it should be fine.

It has a heavenly aroma while cooking, which ought to be packaged and sold.  That reminds me of an eccentric Englishman (is that a redundancy?), who went into a perfumery and asked if they had perfume in either of his favorite smells:  freshly brewed coffee, and baking bread.  They cautiously asked him to leave, but if he had smelled Pseudo-Panettone baking, I just know he would have asked for that, too.

Just like Panettone, the Pseudo-Panettone is great toasted and covered in butter and/or jam.  But this loaf if easier to cut into slices that fit in the toaster, than the round commercial loaves, unless you have a round-loaf-making electric bread machine!

Customizing the Recipe...

As you probably know, the best part about home baking is that it allows you to adjust a recipe to your personal tastes, or dietary restrictions.  Here are some ideas about how to alter this recipe.

• Replace the 1/4 cup candied orange and lemon peel with 1 tsp each of grated orange and lemon rind.  (Some people hate candied peel.)
• Replace the milk with water, soy milk, or orange juice for a lactose free diet.
• Use rum soaked raisons instead of plain raisons, or cut the amount, or double the amount of raisons to suit your tastes.
• Substitute some of the milk (or other liquid - see above) with Marsala Wine, Amaretto, or another liquor, for extra flavor.
• You can use less sugar.  And, of course, you can replace the sugar with a with dietary sweetener, but be forewarned that it often changes the texture of the cake.  And don't forget, the yeast works best with at least some sugar in the recipe.

Amaretti Cookies (these are chewy)

5 chilled egg whites whipped stiff (roughly 2/3 cup of egg whites, before whipping)

1 cup sugar (250 grams)

2 1/2 cups ground almonds (310 grams)

1 tsp baking powder

Gradually stir the dry ingredients into the whipped egg whites.  Use a spoon and stir gently so as to deflate the whites as little as possible.  

When all is mixed in, drop the dough by spoonfuls onto a buttered cooking tray.  Bake in a low temperature oven for 15 minutes, with the oven door half open during the cooking.  

I know that sounds crazy, but it works best.  Turn the tray around halfway through the cooking time so they cook evenly. 

If you're not in to cooking, or don't have the time, here are three very economical alternatives available via Amazon.com.