Italian panettone cake

Step-by-step preparation

Cooking time: 5 hr

1. STEP 1

   

   How to bake Italian panettone cake? Prepare your food. For this recipe I would highly recommend using a kitchen scale, accuracy is very important here. Therefore, yolks are given in grams and not in the number of eggs. All products should be at room temperature; remove eggs and butter from the refrigerator in advance. In addition to lemon, you can also take orange.

2. STEP 2

   

   Sift the flour into a large bowl. Be sure to do this, sifting saturates the flour with oxygen, which makes the baked goods airy. Plus it removes unnecessary impurities that may end up in flour.

3. STEP 3

   

   Add all other dry ingredients to the flour - sugar, vanilla sugar and dry yeast. If you took fresh yeast, then do not add it now, it will go into the liquid ingredients later. Read about all the intricacies of working with different types of yeast in a separate article (link at the end of the recipe).

4. STEP 4

   

   Mix the dry ingredients well with a whisk.

5. STEP 5

   

   In another bowl, mix egg yolks and honey. 150 grams is approximately 8 yolks of CO category eggs, but they must be weighed and measured out in an even amount. Heat the milk until warm. It should be warm, but not scalding, otherwise the yeast in it will die and the baked goods will not turn out lush. Add milk to the yolks, mix well. If you are using fresh yeast, add it at this stage.

6. STEP 6

   

   Next, combine both mixtures by pouring the liquid ingredients into the dry ones. Stir the mixture with a whisk. If you have a mixer with dough attachments, it’s better to use it; you can also use a whisk or your hands, but it will be long and difficult. I'm not looking for easy ways, so I kneaded with my hands.

7. STEP 7

   

   When both mixtures are more or less mixed, start adding soft butter in portions. Stir until the dough is completely homogeneous. It took me about 10 minutes to do this by hand.

8. STEP 8

   

   Remove the zest from the lemon. Rinse the lemon well with baking soda and a brush first to remove the protective wax coating. The zest is the top thin layer of peel that extends to the white layer. Remove it using a fine grater. Rub the lemon carefully so as not to remove the next white layer, which is bitter. If you also took an orange, then remove the zest from it too. Add the zest to the dough. Continue kneading it for another 5 minutes.

9. STEP 9

   

   When the dough is smooth, gather it into a ball. It will remain sticky, use a silicone spatula. Cover the bowl with cling film or a lid and place the dough in a warm place to rise. I heated the oven to 50°C, then waited a little and put the dough in there. If you have warm radiators, then place them nearby. The main thing is that there are no drafts.

10. STEP 10

    

    While the dough is rising, prepare the dried fruit. Rinse the raisins and candied fruits thoroughly in a colander, and then pour in a small amount of boiling water. Add cognac there. Instead of cognac, you can use rum, whiskey or other strong aromatic alcohol. Leave the whole thing to soak for a few hours.

11. STEP 11

    

    The dough should rise very much and start to bubble. This can take anywhere from 3 to 6 hours, depending on the temperature and the yeast you use. Mine stood for 4 hours.

12. STEP 12

    

    Start kneading again. The dough will fall a lot, don't be afraid of that. Again, I recommend a mixer. I had to knead it with my hands for about 20 minutes; a mixer would have done it in 5-10. It is necessary to ensure that the dough does not tear when stretched, but stretches for some time.

13. STEP 13

    

    When this is achieved, add raisins and candied fruits. They must first be thrown onto a sieve and the liquid allowed to drain. Mix well.

14. STEP 14

    

    Take baking molds. I baked in paper ones; you don’t need to do anything with them. Grease others with a thin layer of vegetable oil. Pour the dough into the molds, filling them one-third full. I got two large molds, but it could have been divided into three. It’s even better to take small ones, not big ones, then you’ll get about 4. The dough is quite heavy, and in small Easter cakes it will bake better and faster.

15. STEP 15

    

    Return the dough, now in the molds, to the heat. I turned the oven back on to 50°C, turned it off, waited a little, and put the baking tray with the molds in it. The dough will have to rise again, this will take an hour and a half. Mine was warm, it grew like this in an hour.

16. STEP 16

    

    Turn on the oven at 180°C, top-bottom mode. If your cakes were already in the oven, then you don’t have to take them out, but reheat them together. Bake the cakes for 25-30 minutes. If your cakes are large, like mine, then increase the time to 40-45 minutes. If the top starts to brown too much, cover it with circles of foil. Remove the finished cakes and cool. If desired, cover them with any glaze; it will be convenient to make it from the remaining whites. Bon appetit!

Comments on the recipe

Admin Rina

30.08.2023

4.7

Very rich, incredibly soft, tender, airy, aromatic and tasty Easter cake. Katya, thank you for the interesting recipe! I love yeast dough dearly, but I got a little tired of the classic version of Easter cake and wanted to try something new. I'm glad I chose this recipe. I didn’t risk time and effort; I kneaded it using a planetary mixer. My dough was sticky only at the beginning of kneading, and then soft and incredibly manageable (I won’t tire of repeating that flour plays a huge role in baking recipes, I order mine on the Internet and it is of excellent quality, not at all similar to the one on the market). store shelves). From myself: since there is a lot of baking in the dough, to be safe, I first set the dough for 30 minutes, and then started kneading the dough. It is believed that this way the dough rises better. As a result, from a lump at the bottom of a 5-liter bucket, the dough increased to the entire volume of the bucket in 3.5 hours (see photo) - about 5 times. Or more . I used vanilla flavoring instead of vanilla sugar. I also added roasted walnuts to the dough; they gave a beautiful nutty note to the finished cake. I used candied fruits not in the dough, but to decorate the finished Easter cakes. I baked it in paper pans, and I got 6 cakes in a size slightly smaller than average. Only three survived to the photo shoot. I filled the molds with dough approximately 1/5 - 1/4 (by the way, if anyone doesn’t know: the less dough you put in the mold, the airier and more tender the finished cake will be. It is believed that for airy cakes the mold should be filled no more than 1/3, but if you want cakes with a denser structure, then fill the form 1/2 full). For the rise, both the first and second time I used the oven turned on at 30 degrees - very convenient! Once again - thank you so much for the recipe

Lilik75

30.08.2023

4.7

Beauty! Yummy! Thank you! You can cook it this way too.

olgameyer

30.08.2023

4.9

Great panettone recipe! This year I decided to try baking Italian panettone instead of the usual Easter cakes and was very pleased! It's really hard to knead the dough like the recipe says, but it was totally worth it. Airy, melts in your mouth and very tasty. They turned out great, even though this was my first time following the recipe.