Aria said:
er... well... yes and no, on the first question. no problem on the second question. i can tell you how i go about making one, but don't expect any measurements. if that's ok, here we go...
scald some milk. reserve some in a cup and activate some yeast in it. the rest goes in a mixing bowl with a large hunk of butter, so the butter melts while the milk cools.
when the milk is tepid, i add the yeast, a good 5-finger pinch of salt, a handful of sugar, some vanilla, and maybe 3 or 4 eggs per large panettone.
if i want it to be really rich & extra special, i go heavy on the butter, use only yolks of maybe 6 or 7 eggs and use fresh vanilla bean.
add flour till it makes a soft dough, turn it out on the table and, working in flour little by little, knead it until i have a dough that's rather on the soft side.
then i add the dried fruit: finely diced candied lemon and orange rind, dried cranberries and raisins. if i don't have the candied rinds on hand (they're hard for me to get here) i use lemon and orange zest.
let rise once, then punch down and divide the dough into individual panettone portions. let them rise the second time in the pan (or whatever) they are going to baked in. i grease the pans and then place in greased and floured wax paper or baking paper, sized to fit. here are a few of the "pans" i've used successfully in the past: coffee cans, large and small, spring-form pans, deep ss mixing bowls, souffle dishes, and no pan at all, only a baking sheet. i've also used the paper from large paper shopping bags. short sided pans like a spring-form pan will need a tall collar. on a baking sheet, you can put 3 or 4 balls of dough on the sheet and just place a tall collar around each one. tall collars will need to be secured with string, staples or those heavy-duty paper clips that have the fold-down "thingies. regular paper clips have proven to be not secure enough.
i let them rise until i start to worry if they might collapse. gently gild the tops. then i bake in a moderate oven till they look done, half an hour to an hour or so, depending on the size of the pan. sometimes i start them off in a hot oven for 10 minutes or so, but mainly because i like to fool around trying this and that. can't say that i've noticed any difference one way or another.
hope this helps. if not, "real" recipes are only a google search away.
let's hope someone comes through with their sicilian grandmother's recipe.
