Christmas panettone

What's a holiday without some outlandish baking project?

I got the recipe for this panettone from my trusty Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day. It seemed appropriately over-the-top. And while not quite as easy as my daily bread, it was a cinch as far as outlandish holiday baking goes. (You can find the recipe over at their blog.)

The dough smelled amazing, but was threatening to overflow my 19-cup-capacity bucket. Oops.



This morning, with the dough appropriately chilled, I scooped out a handful and tried desperately to form a gluten cloak. The recipe called for the usual shaping, pulling the dough around to the sides until a gluten cloak forms. This stuff was so sticky, the whole idea of shaping was a joke. It ended up just getting dumped in the molds, helter-skelter.



Then they're supposed to "rest" for an hour and forty minutes. When I do this stuff with regular bread dough, it rises during this "rest" period, especially dough that's in a loaf pan.



But this dough hardly rose at all. So I was getting a little worried....



But the oven seemed to do the trick.



And now... ta-da!



Full disclosure: I have not tasted this yet. But seriously, how could it be bad? They're gorgeous.

I can definitely see this becoming a holiday tradition. Lovely, lovely, lovely.