For many, panettone is a staple of Christmas celebrations. It is a lightly sweetened yeast bread that is traditionally served around Christmas in Italy. The bread is rich with butter and eggs, and is packed with dried fruits and candied citrus. The fluffy texture, as well as its sweetness, put it somewhere between a bread and a cake. The beautifully packaged breads also make popular gifts for friends and coworkers, and many people end up with two or three around the house in addition to one that they bought themselves. The breads can be sliced and eaten plain, but once you have more than one you’re going to start to wonder what else you can do with them. Here are five ideas that will let you use up that leftover Panettone:
- Toast – It may sound simple, but panettone makes wonderful slices of toast that make a great addition to any breakfast. The flavors in the already buttery bread are enhanced by toasting, and the sweetness is brought out of the dried fruits, too. Spread toasted slices generously with butter (and even sprinkle with sugar if you’re looking for a sweet treat) before serving.
- Panettone French Toast – Another take on toast, french toast is a good way to use up any extra bread that you might have in your kitchen. The rich bread makes an excellent base for the eggy batter and makes a very indulgent french toast recipe. I like to add a pinch of cinnamon to my batter, as it goes very well with the citrus in the panettone.
- Eggnog Bread Pudding – Eggnog is another common leftover from the Christmas holiday. Combining eggnog and panettone into this decadent dessert allows you to really clear out your kitchen. The bread pudding is easy to make, and with the vanilla-nutmeg flavor of eggnog and all those flavorful fruits from the panettone, you will get a lot of holiday flavor in each serving.
- Streusel-Topped Baked French Toast – This breakfast casserole dish is a cross between french toast, bread pudding and coffee cake. It’s great for serving a big crowd and will use up a lot of extra bread (panettone or otherwise). The dish is rich and custardy, but eggier than a regular bread pudding, and it is topped off with a sweet, buttery streusel before baking.
- Rum Cake – Some panettones are spiked with a bit of amaretto or other liqueurs. If you have a whole loaf of the stuff to use up, poke some holes in it with a long skewer and generously douse it with a rum-sugar syrup (amounts vary, but 1 cup rum with 1/3 cup sugar is a good place to start). Allow the bread to sit for a day or two – well-wrapped – to soak it all up, then serve slices of the extra-moist cake as a festive treat at New Year’s.
It wouldn’t be Christmas morning with a big mug of hot chocolate topped with marshmallows – preferably Homemade Vanilla Marshmallows! Hope that your holiday is filled with hot chocolate, cookies and all kinds of other goodies.
Merry Christmas everyone!
The holidays are all about traditions and, for most of us, that tradition includes baking. Even people who don’t use their oven at all the rest of the year often pull out an old favorite recipe and bake a batch of cookies before Christmas. Of course, I’m going to be an advocate for baking year-round, but there are definitely some treats that only pop up around the holidays and they are things that we look forward to as part of the holiday season. That makes me wonder: what is your favorite holiday treat to bake?
I like to keep things simple and Butter Cookies topped with sprinkles and Gingerbread Men are typically treats that I save for the holidays. I also save peppermint treats, like Candy Cane Cupcakes and Peppermint Snickerdoodles for the holidays because they pair perfectly with hot chocolate, another favorite winter treat. Finally, I always cook up a batch of crepes to have a special breakfast on Christmas morning, too.
So, what are your favorite holiday treats to bake? Do you save a special recipe just for this time of year?
There are plenty of ways to decorate cookies. They can be shaped and sliced, rolled and cut with cookie cutters, topped with sprinkles or spread with frosting. Cookies can also be stamped with designs, and the Holiday Cookie Stamps from Williams Sonoma are a fun way to decorate cookies for the holidays. The stamps are made of cast aluminum (produced by Nordic Ware) and feature three different festive designs: a snowflake, a gift tag and a wreath. They stamps have very clear designs with a lot of detail, and there are smooth wooden handles on each stamp to make them easy to hold and use. Essentially, all you need to do is push the stamp down onto a ball of cookie dough and your holiday cookie is ready to bake.
The stamps performed very, very well and my cookies came out looking just like the cookies on the box. You could see every detail clearly, including the text that was printed on the cookies! The dough for must cutout cookies needs to be chilled before you roll it out. The dough for these does not need to be as cold (it’s easier to press the cookies the closer the dough is to room temperature). I do recommend chilling whatever dough you’re working with at least slightly, however, as dough that was too-warm did occasionally stick to the stamp. These will stay in my holiday toolbox and I might even keep an eye out for other holiday designs throughout the year.
The stamps are fun to use and the results are great. Choose a shortbread or butter cookie recipe that won’t spread much, such as my Classic Cutout Christmas Cookies, to get the cleanest results from the stamp. Also, be sure to clean the stamps extremely well with soap and water before you use them, as the cast aluminum can leave a little bit of residue/discoloring on the dough if they haven’t been thoroughly washed before use.
There are many kinds of cut-out cookie doughs that you can choose from when you’re setting out to make some festively decorated cookies for Christmas or another holiday occasion. Chocolate doughs, vanilla doughs, gingerbread doughs – you really can’t go wrong with any of them. Some doughs are much easier to work with than others, however, and that is what makes these Classic Christmas Cutout Cookies one of my go-to recipes when I want to bake and decorate cut-out cookies for the holidays!
The cookie dough is firm and very easy to work with. In fact, you don’t need much more than a sprinkling of flour on your work surface when rolling out the chilled cookie dough because it is not very sticky. Since you don’t need much flour to roll out the dough, this also means that you can reroll your scraps once or twice more than most other doughs, as it will not toughen up very much. The finished cookies are buttery and crisp, without being hard, and have a strong note of vanilla to them. They only brown slightly in the oven, leaving you with a very even surface for decorating and a dough that can handle cookie cutters that have a lot of detail to them.
There are many options for decorating these cookies. The dough is not too sweet, so you can load up the cookies with sprinkles if you want to make them easy and colorful. You can also top it with a smear of cream cheese or buttercream icing (not my preference, but a favorite of many kids). I typically make a simple, but thick, confectioners’ sugar glaze and pipe it onto the cookies in a very fine piping bag, making both simple and complex designs. It is easy to make, dries hard and adds just a hint of extra sweetness.
This dough can be made a couple of days ahead of time and stored in the fridge until you’re ready to use it. The baking time will vary slightly depending on how thick you roll out your dough: roll to 1/8-inch for crisper cookies and 1/4-inch for slightly softer ones.
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