Panettone

Panettone

I love baking. I love the Great British Bake Off. And I love Panettone! Last Christmas (not the Christmas we just had but I mean in 2011) we bought a huge Panettone from the supermarket, but this year they had run out and only had tiny ones (which wouldn't even be big enough for baby Trinity).

We felt sad that we weren't going to have a Panettone but then my mum spotted this recipe on Jo Wheatley's website called Jo's Blue Aga (she was the winner of the 2011 Bake Off and she and Holly were my favourites that year).

So me and my mum decided to try to make it even though neither of us had EVER baked a Panettone ever before.

We stuck to the recipe as closely as we could (because that's when things go wrong usually when mum thinks that it 'doesn't look right' and adds more of something like her cheese sauce that ALWAYS goes wrong). The only things we didn't have were the zest paste and the niblets so we used the zest of a lemon and the juice of half a lemon for that bit and then sprinkled sugar on the top instead of niblets.

Here I am zesting a lemon

The dough needs to prove twice. Here it is after the first proving. It grew loads!

Panettone dough after first proving

The knocking-back was hard work. And then we left it for it's second proving.

It grew again for the second proving

Finally after many hours of proving in total it was ready to bake and then this is what it looked like when it was cooked. And it tasted great!!!

Because it uses lots of egg yolks but you only need one egg white, we saved all the other egg whites and the next day, mum made a pavlova with them (and that was the first time she made a pavlova!) and that tasted great too.