If you wanted to buy a panettone 20 years ago, you would have to go to an Italian deli. Now a large part of every supermarket’s Christmas baking shelves is taken up with them.

If you wanted to buy a panettone 20 years ago, you would have to go to an Italian deli. Now a large part of every supermarket’s Christmas baking shelves is taken up with them.

While I admire the look of panettone I struggle to understand why they are so popular. As a cake (they are really a bread) they are at most decent. Often they contain little fruit, taste of artificial vanilla, and are too sweet and insubstantial. Take, on the other hand, a traditional British Christmas cake: a proper heavy fruit cake “fed” with booze then decorated with marzipan and white royal icing … No contest.

Every part of a real fruit cake has its own story. The fruit cake dates back to times when traders – and crusaders – brought preserved fruits such as sultanas and candied peel, nuts such as sweet almonds and spices back from their tours of the southern Mediterranean. Until the arrival of sugar in Europe, brought back from the Americas, the earliest cakes were sweetened with honey.

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