Panettone Bread & Butter Pudding

Recipe-of-week
Pairs of socks, boxes of dates and spruce trees left discarded on our cities pavements. Every year Christmas has its casualties and once the tinsel has come down, and 12th night is behind us there are always a few forgotten relics of the festive season. 

In recent years the rise of a more fashionable gastronomic Christmas, means that along with goose fat, panettone has become the trendy present of the yuletide season. Swapped between trendy urbanites this fruity and sweet Northern Italian bread comes wrapped in meters of shimmery plastic and ribbon, but nobody ever seems to ever eat them.


Instead they are passed on from relative to relative at post Christmas family gatherings, like the box scented soap that you picked up in the Church fete tombola. 

All this leads me to the conclusion that I am not alone in my dislike of this Milanese bake because it cant make its mind up. Rather like hybrid bicycles Panettone  is neither 'arses nor fanny'. Is it bread? Or is it a cake? People say it goes down well with a cup of tea or sweet wine –  Id rather have a slice of fruit cake. Others say it is delicious with salty butter. I cant get it to stay in one piece.

For these reasons a brightly wrapped Panettone, kindly donated by my cousins was still taking up some prime real estate in my kitchen this weekend. But instead of 'passing the parcel' this year I decided to break the Panettone chain and make what turned out to be a delicious Panettone bread and butter pudding. Already containing candied orange, citron and lemon zest, as well as raisins. It means you have little work to do and with many supermarkets clearing their stocks of Panettone at this time of year you can feed plenty of people with a delicious warming winter desert that will not break the bank.

  • 50g of butter, plus extra for greasing the dish. 
  • One Panettone
  • 500ml of whole milk 
  • 100 ml of double cream
  • 3 free-range eggs 
  • 50g  granulated sugar

1. Grease a large pie dish with butter.

2. Cut the panettone into chunky slices. Spread each slice on one side with butter, then cut into triangles.

3. Arrange a layer of panettone, buttered-side up, in the bottom of the dish and repeat the layers until you have used up all of the panettone.

4. Gently warm the milk in a pan over a low heat. Don't let it boil.

5. Crack the eggs into a bowl, add the sugar and lightly whisk until pale.

6. Add the warm milk and cream mixture and stir well, then strain the custard into a bowl. 

7. Pour the custard over the prepared panettone layers and leave to stand for 30 minutes.

8. Preheat the oven to 180C/355F/Gas 4.

9. Place the dish into the oven and bake for 30-40 minutes, or until the custard has set and the top is golden-brown.

Bread and butter

This entry was posted on Monday, January 12th, 2009 at 10:27 and is filed under Recipes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed or trackback from your own site. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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